Big - doesn’t mean successful
Some articles speculate about the consideration of Dell to sell RSA and Google to shut down its cloud completely in few years if it will reach certain market reach.
It is necessary to be able to get rid of non-core assets. It is an idea behind such a move taking into account that RSA was “bundled” with EMC. Even the acquisition of RSA by EMC far back in 2006 raised questions as already then the company did not cope very well with its broad products line, although the acquisition was aimed at diversifying the business even more. As history has shown the solution did not take off - the storage portfolio expanded, broad horizontal integration between the businesses didn`t happen (not to mention VMware and Pivotal), neither growth. Modern RSA is no longer the same, long time ago it was, in fact, synonymous with security and encryption.
In the current situation, given the development of the industry and the emergence of security as one of the cornerstones of IT, the technology stack of RSA products has sufficiently fallen behind the leaders. And the digital transformation presented by the leaders of the company has not yet yielded tangible results. It should be noted that Dell also has its security solutions which are not a priority compared to the storage and servers. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to concentrate on the main direction so that EMC’s fate does not fall.
Moving to Google consideration to close its cloud in 3-5 years in case it fails to meet the necessary market share capture targets. Admitting to such a decision has its logic: the startup market is owned by AWS, and the leader makes every effort to ensure that the situation does not change. Enterprises migrated to Azure, mainly due to Microsoft’s experience and connections. And there are still plenty of niche players: Oracle, who, finally, admitted that customers are looking for the cloud and moving its products to cloud nature; IBM earning a lot on outsourcing, Virtustream and Rackspace playing in their sandboxes. And as a cherry on top is dozens of niche players, starting with OVH ending local partners of one of the leaders.
From a technological point of view, the datacenter for the public cloud is not the same as the data center for private usage. If Google`s own internal data center dies, no one is likely to notice. In case of a failure in a public region, the reputation will cause substantial damage, plus financial losses and related expenses. At the same time, IaaS and PaaS businesses are much less profitable compared to SaaS. To catch up with a leader(s) Google needs a billion-dollar investment with a not-so-clear purpose and result.
Google has built its business on high-level management of collected information, to put it simply - advertising. The IaaS is much less marginal business compared to advertising and puts some problems on top. Dell built its business on hardware, and EMC acquisition simply covered weak points. Attempts to expand and diversify the business are good and useful, but sometimes it is necessary to get rid of assets that do not bring proper profit, and constantly monitor yourself.
But so far, all these are rumors and an attempt to predict the development of events. Let’s see what will happen and how the leaders of companies pursuing such ambitious goals will cope with the situation.