Who thinks VCE is a good idea?

I remember in the early days of UCS, the competitive question on the table was “I don’t see why I’d want to do this, noone is using it” and I also imagine to hear that echoed here today.

So, who DOES think that this whole VCE coalition is a good idea? Is anyone willing to put their name against it? (Other than the CEO’s of 3 of the largest and best of breed innovative companies on the planet?)

Certainly, Steven Tally – CTO of Purdue University wouldn’t go on record saying:

“Purdue is a research university and the majority of our IT needs are spent on high-performance computing, which requires strong computing, massive amounts of storage, and high-speed networking fabric,” said Steven Tally, CTO of Purdue University.  “The Vblock solution offers these elements in a single pre-tested, pre-integrated solution which will be easier to deploy.  VMware, Cisco, and EMC are ideal partners to respond to this problem because they offer complementary tool sets and have a history of delivering good products in the market space.  When these solutions are tied together in a coherent and systematic way, it is very good news for an environment like Purdue.”

I mean, frankly that’d be ridiculous! That’s  because no one is obviously using this ‘untested’ ‘untrained’ and certainly ‘unplanned’ initiative of aligning three worldclass businesses together around efforts to improve the experience in data centers and making the private cloud a reality?   I frankly know of many other businesses leveraging VCE, as well as many getting ready to sign off on it, and thus I will not share that information until I have something external to reference on it (I do like keeping my job, kthx! ;))