It's interesting that all of the major IT vendors are returning to the old model of selling pre-integrated technology stacks to sell their wares.. It seems that the days of having "one great product" that can drive revenue (of the size that the large vendors need) are numbered and, as a result, the big guns are going back to positioning themselves as "one stop shops" for technology.
IBM(who never really moved away from the old model !) are now positioning themselves as "chip to command-line" suppliers, leaning heavily on Linux and virtualization enablers
Oraclehave obviously acquired Sun to provide an integrated stack
Cisco/EMC/Vmware have partnered (with themselves !?) to create VCE to aggressively go after "Cloud"
Microsoft and HP are partnering to enable future Hyper V, .NET installations and the Azure cloud platform.
Let's hope that, this time around, customers will actually benefit from this dynamic. Also, it is clear the Symantec need a very strong proposition in order to stay at the table in large data centre transformations.
Darren
