Acadia and Its Place in the World

I can remember, in what seems like a really long time ago, about the creation of a new company that will support the coalition of VMware, Cisco and EMC’s vBlock product: Acadia.  I had really long forgotten about the new company that was going to be formed when EMC really started their hiring blitz and campaign to get all the well known talent that EMC could get their hand on.  That had been the news and buzz in the industry, as well as a nonstop twitter topic speculation about who was going to be the next person  to enroll in Chad’s Army as a vSpecialist.  It really appeared that the EMC crew was going to be in the best position to support and sell vBlock technology.

What got my attention about Acadia again was Chad Sakac blog post about “More than 200 open positions at EMC, EMC partners and VCE.” In case you had forgotten about them also Acadia, it is a joint venture, founded by Cisco and EMC with capital investments from VMware and Intel. It is the combination of these companies that make up the VCE Coalition. The VCE is VMware for the virtualization, Cisco for the networking and server hardware and EMC for the storage.  All of this to be able to present a faster and safer transition to a next generation data center environment.

EMC has had great success staffing up their vSpecialists and now Acadia is looking to follow that success by staffing up with their version, which will be called vArchitects.  Are these groups going to be in competition with each other or are they going to end up complementing each other.  I proposed this question to Chad Sakac from EMC and was told that the team would be working with each other in a complementary fashion.  The Acadia vArchitects would focus solely on the vBlock technology exclusively and the EMC vSpecialists would be able to work on hybrid setups of the VCE Coalition. By hybrid setups I mean they could be involved with deployments with VMware and EMC technology as well as anyone of the other server venders like IBM, HP or Dell.

Since Acadia is going to “enhance” the offerings of VMware, Cisco and EMC I find myself wondering how much is going to change in the way the parent companies are doing things now for Acadia for it to be a solid success.  I think the sales team will remain within the parent companies which can leave the evangelism and pre-sales with Acadia. I definitely see the next VMworld dodge ball match adding a new team to the mix.

I think it will be interesting to watch the rise of Acadia and how it positions itself in line with the other support teams. This rise is going to happen quick based on all the hiring that they are doing in a short amount of time.  The major push to the cloud has really started to take off since VMworld and it should be a really interesting ride for the next few years as the cloud adoption really comes in to play and watching how managed services from providers get redefined around the cloud.