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I read with great interest the recent blog written by Chuck Hollis of EMC. It was an excellent post about the difficulty and challenges of creating a Converged Infrastructure (CI) solution that is real, as opposed to “funding and PowerPoint”.

In the blog, Chuck points out several things a vendor has to achieve in order to deliver a CI solution to the market. He also states that the customers only have 2 choices – Do It Yourself, or chose a pre-configured block such as his company's VCE vBlock.

That’s the part of the blog that I don’t agree with. There is a third choice – an Open, pre-integrated Converged Infrastructure solution. How can you be pre-configured and Open? Well, it’s fairly straight forward, though many of the 7 items Chuck lists as mandatory are still necessary. You still need to have a focused product that is integrated, tested, and certified. And you still need a good channel with responsive support and professional services. However, you don’t need to lock your customers in to a single alliance or a mandated choice of hardware.

Customers like choice. Forcing a customer to choose a single stack of pre-integrated vendors is like time warping back to the mainframe model of the 60’s and 70’s. Yes, the mainframe was pre-integrated and certified with certain storage and network partners. It was also expensive and locked the customer in to a hardware platform that was difficult to migrate from. Raising switching costs is, of course, ideal for vendors. Not so much for customers.

While an integrated model is attractive for many reasons, Open Always Wins in the end. There are countless examples. Some transitions take longer than others, but Open Always Wins.

Chuck mentions Apple products in his blog as an example of consumer side "blocks". I wonder if he has seen the latest Android market share numbers and noticed how quickly it has gained on Apple. Android is available on a multitude of hardware platforms and has an application mix that rivals the iPhone.

At Egenera, we understand the value in pre-integrated stacks of hardware and software in a Converged Infrastructure environment. Heck, we invented this space over 10 years ago. However, we also understand that most customers want choice and do not want to entrust their future to any single vendor or alliance. While it’s true that some customers prefer to get a block of technology and are willing to give up choice, many want choice so they can leverage the best pricing or best support for their organization. It's a smart move as customers naturally seek to avoid vendor lock-in.

Egenera's PAN Manager software provides the key benefits of Converged Infrastructure but offers the customers choice on server hardware , networking hardware, storage hardware, hypervisor, and operating systems. Our strategy is to let the customer choose the hardware and software combination that is best for them and let PAN Manager manage the environment. This is not a “funding and PowerPoint” solution, as we have hundreds of customers around the globe and thousands of installations. And while these “blocks” are pre-certified and offer the benefits described in the post by Chuck, they have the important difference of being open.

Open Always Wins.