But the premise of the argument lands on shaky ground. Directly comparing cloud computing and hardware manufacturing uses apples and oranges logic. The reason being, as Howard Marks puts it:
Why don’t IBM, HP, EMC, Dell and Cisco all merge and get this thing over with?
— Ashlee Vance (@valleyhack) October 8, 2015
While cloud computing uses a different business model than legacy competitors, it is still requires physical servers. So saying companies like Dell-EMC will get “fucked by the cloud” isn’t exactly true.
“The Cloud” is NOT a storage medium, it’s a storage LOCATION. Comparing disk to cloud is like comparing steak to Ruth’s Chris
— Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet) October 13, 2015
But the market for large corporations that need their own physical data centers is still huge. HP, Dell, IBM, EMC, and Oracle are still the major players in that respect. Not everyone is gung-ho about the cloud. It makes businesses heavily reliant on the internet, which is controlled by third-party ISPs. In the developing world, particularly, good internet isn’t always a reality. Furthermore, the cloud is also often criticized for being less secure than using private data centers.
On top of all that, the recent rise of the hybrid cloud, which combines local hardware and remote cloud elements, may well lead to a resurgence of the old guard. This is especially true of Dell-EMC, which can leverage its VMWare virtualization under a datacenter-as-a-service business model.
“Dell laptop keyboard” by David Precious licensed under CC BY 2.0
