EMC, Cisco, Intel & VMWare Launch Joint Venture in Marlborough
PHOTO/COURTESY
Michael Capellas, chairman of VCE, speaks during the company's grand opening of its Marlborough facility, with championship trophies from the Boston Red Sox, Boston Celtics and New England Patriots in the background.
Why would four leading technology companies, including Hopkinton-based EMC, team up together?
According to Bob Wambach, senior director of corporate marketing for VCE - the joint venture created by EMC, Cisco, Intel and VMWare - the new privately-held company will be able to offer something that none of the four businesses are able to offer themselves: A comprehensive IT solution featuring the top offerings from each individual company.
VCE, or Virtual Computing Environment, sells the Vblock, which includes data storage by EMC, networking capabilities by Cisco, virtualization technology from VMWare, and processing power from Intel.
"VCE was founded on the premise that in the future, customers aren't going to want to buy different components that they have to assemble themselves," Wambach said.
People don't buy the parts to a car and put them together, so why would they want to do that with an IT infrastructure, Wambach asked.
Yesterday, officials with VCE opened a new customer solutions center in Marlborough that will house Vblocks, plus up to 150 employees.
Coming Together
VCE began in November 2009 with support from each of the four companies, with EMC and Cisco being the main backers of the project. While headquartered in Texas, VCE has bi-costal operations, with an office near the Cisco and VMWare headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., to go along with the brand-new office at 350 Campus Dr. in Marlborough.
Wambach said Marlborough was a natural location for the company because it is between EMC's Franklin headquarters - where the Vblocks are assembled - and Cisco's major operations center in Boxborough.
The site is meant for customer demonstrations, proof of concepts and meetings, Wambach said. On Wednesday, company officials were joined by the championship trophies of the Boston Red Sox, Boston Celtics and New England Patriots to celebrate the grand opening.
VCE is hiring mostly new employees, although it has tapped some workers from the four companies that created VCE, Wambach said. In total, the company has about 900 workers, he said.
Its chairman is Michael Capellas, former CEO for Compaq Computer Corp. and MCI and its president is Frank Hauck, former head of EMC's storage division.
Revenues for the privately held joint venture are funneled through to each company, Wambach explained. Each Vblock contains components from each of the four companies, so when one is sold, the revenues for the EMC components go to EMC and Cisco gets the revenues of the components it put in the product.
Wambach said the solution is one-stop shopping for customers that are looking for an integrated IT infrastructure.
"This is way the of the future," he said, noting that other companies, including Hewlett-Packard and IBM, have recently launched converged IT models as well.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the relationship between Hewlett-Packard and IBM. The companies offer a converged infrastructure.
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