One of the most interesting announcements of the year was Microsoft's Azure Appliance — a container of 1,000 servers, delivered to your data center, running an up-to-date private version of the Azure Cloud platform. Last year we saw the introductions of Cisco's UCS, the Cisco/VMware/EMC VCE consortium, V-Block system blueprints and Acadia JV, all intended to help their customers achieve utility computing more quickly. Well if that's the goal, isn't something like the Azure Appliance an even better answer? Of course you have to have some respect for the importance of the Windows software and business ecologies, and you have to think Azure is pretty interesting on its own, but with those caveats isn't the appliance version interesting! The initial package (presumably similar to the container level packaging which Microsoft uses to build out Azure and their other large properties) is inappropriate for most but not all (huge chunk of platform, specific cooling and power requirements) but is a natural first step. With the issues of non-Microsoft multi-tenancy and new network topologies understood, a next step of creating smaller packages seems pretty straightforward (Microsoft has already said they are moving to a smaller granularity for their own data centers). What Microsoft clearly understands (or at least Bob Muglia clearly understands) is the difference between having a customer build their own utility solution out of the pieces (Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center and Virtual Machine Manager, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint,...) and giving them an up-to-date and evolving platform is pretty dramatic. UCS and VBlock customers are still dependent on the product development and release cycle of VMware, EMC, Cisco and others, and still fully responsible for the pain and anguish of integrating new versions.
Last month, Cisco and EMC appointed Michael Capellas to lead the VCE coalition and named him CEO of ACADIA the Cisco-EMC joint venture with investment from Intel and VMware where he reports to Joe Tucci, John Chambers and the ACADIA board (consisting of two EMC execs and two Cisco execs plus Capellas). It's hard to imagine anyone able to have that many top level bosses but Capellas certainly isn't your average CEO. Capellas was Chairman and CEO of Compaq in 1998 leading up to its acquisition by HP where he spent time after the merger as president. After that he ran MCI during a difficult rebuilding phase. You might wonder why Capellas would take on an assignment like ACADIA - we've been told since it was formed in November 2009 that ACADIA was set up to sell Vblocks - preconfigured versions of Cisco's UCS server, EMC storage and VMware software. But maybe there's going to be more to this story than that - what might interest someone like Capellas is the launching pad to build something bigger - more than an entity selling preconfigured packages - more like a new computer company. ACADIA could be the perfect platform for doing this — with a birthright consisting of networking, server, storage, software and with Capellas as CEO can it grow quickly enough to compete with the likes of computer giants IBM and HP?