The folks at EMC have been making a big effort to make social networking tools such as blogging and Twitter a part of this year’s EMC World event in Orlando, to connect the 7000 people that made it to the show with the many more that couldn’t.
Their efforts include a swanky bloggers lounge where bloggers canplug into some power bars to recharge their laptop batteries, get a cupof cappuccino to recharge their internal batteries, and a bank oflaptops to blog or tweet their thoughts on the show.
And speaking of tweeting, EMC has promoted #emcworldhas the hashtag for the show, and its being used by a good manyconference attendees to share their thoughts on the show, particularlythe morning keynotes. And as part of the keynote hall setup, #emcworldtweets have been scrolling over the big screens for the audience.
Of course, when you open things up, not all the feedback will be positive. A rival storage vendor, Hitachi Data Systems,has been following EMC World, and they used Twitter to draw theattention of attendees to a few blog posts where they have a fewcomments on the keynotes and EMC’s social networking experiments.
Take this entry from Christophe Bernard, senior director of productmarketing for platforms and business continuity at Hitachi DataSystems, which he titled “Thousands tolerate Tucci keynote to escape Orlando showers”:
You can tell EMC’s folks have been busy opening Twitter accountsto make it look like there’s actually something to talk about. So, allwe got from the keynotes was a regurgitation of the same market trendswe’ve heard about a million times, with virtualization front andcenter. Except for Storage Virtualization, which their platform can’tdo. Now of course, someone has to ask about virtual profits too!!!
We also got another blog entry from Asim Zaheer, HDS’ vice-president for product and competitive marketing, titled “The new green – recycled content!”:
The problem I have with that statement is that everything EMCdoes from a storage perspective is centered on proliferating islands ofinfrastructure and making data migration and provisioning acrossheterogeneous environments difficult, if not impossible.
Like Bernard, Zaheer also brings the snark (which I’m all for by theway) but he also raises some interesting points about green IT. Really,though, just how “green” is any vendor, Hitachi and EMC included?That’s a debatable question, to be sure.
Still, two blog entries in one day from HDS does seem like a shotacross EMC’s bow of sorts. We’ll watch the choppy social networkingwaters for any return fire.
