IBM Buys Moshe and the Sunshine Band (XIV)

IBM announced this morning that it acquired Israeli storage company XIV, founded by Moshe Yanai back in 2002ish. Moshe is the father of the Symmetrix, designed to destroy IBM's then stranglehold on the high-end disk market – which he was pretty darned successful at doing. Along the way, one could argue that that was the birth of the entire "block storage as a separate market" as well, making a lot of people a lot of money and giving me something to do in life.

I was literally having a brief we wrote on XIV posted this morning, so you can get our take there.

As far as the IBM thing goes, it will be interesting to see. IBM isn't immune to the fact that there is a whole wide world of brand new digital content being created every day and they are going to have to participate with new products and technologies in order to play. The good news is that IBM is not playing catch up this time, as no one is really in the lead on this new set of "Infrastructure 2.0" opportunities, so with their brand muscle they have as good a shot as anyone to make the rules. XIV in the hands of a global IT behemoth like IBM could be a powerful play – or they could screw it up – but at least they get the opportunity to dance this time.

They won't be alone for long, but any head start is a good head start if they have a plan to push forward quickly. Finally, it seems to me that this play has the opportunity to extend way beyond just another "storage" buy. This is an architecture that fits into IBM's data center of the future pitch seamlessly, carries huge services potential (assessments, data migrations, and ongoing data lifecycle management and protection), and has the ability to wrap a ton of other IBM product/technology around it. If IBM can use a this architecture as a reason to have the "why are you doing that?" conversation with high-end IT professionals (around treating fixed digital content the same with they treat transactional information) and get it to "we can show you how to be much more efficient and effective" then part of the ultimate solution will end up opening up opportunities for everything from FileNet to Tivoli.

More to come……

Comments

[Tony Pearson]

Hi Steve,
A few people asked me why you don't have any IBM bloggers on your blog roll. They thought it was strange for you to have other vendor blogs. Here's mine if you are looking to update soon for 2008:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/
InsideSystemStorage

Thanks

-----Consider it done. By all means pardon the oversight. I really need Dave Barry's blog, as he is my new favorite read. Steve

[Taylor Allis]

Steve - I'd love to hear your thoughts on the traditional storage architectures vs. the emerging "insertbuzzwordhere 2.0" architectures...

- Taylor

----I think you'll find those thought scattered around the internet, but I'm working on a piece right now to try to articulate the implications of the new world order and hope to publish it in short order. In summary, there have been 3 waves of commercial computing - the transactional core wave, the distributied computing wave, and now the digital content wave. Where the attributes and requirements of the first two waves were similar (important to note - they were accretive waves, though thought to be combative) - and differed by usage functions much more than architectural differences, the 3rd wave changes everything. I'm on a lot of planes next week so I hope to finish the thought then. Thanks ---Steve