Then the October quarters results came out. The situation was so bad that EMC announced an increase in planned job cuts to 4,000, up from the 2,400 announced in September (itself in addition to 1,600 cuts earlier in the year). The company also slashed marketing by a third from its peak levels and cut manufacturing significantly.
In an attempt to face the music, EMC realized the only way to differentiate itself was to write better software that would not only improve the performance of its hardware but also work across rival vendors' storage systems. For EMC to even consider its competition in this way was unprecedented.
The final stroke for EMC was when former senior EMC executives told Byte and Switch that a compensation scheme involving Moshe Yanai, the inventor of the companys flagship technology, could be a key factor in its declining sales. Just two weeks after this story broke, EMC sidelined Yanai who had been VP and head of engineering for over a decade, to the honorable position of EMC Fellow.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
