A Tale of Two Media-Relations Strategies

You may or may not have noticed here at The Station yesterday, but we posted what we thought was a benign item explaining that worldwide storage market leader EMC is planning an event on April 14 to make a big announcement. They’ve been advertising all over the place for people to sign up for this event and watch it online, but details haven’t been made available.

My item had the date (already public information), some background about how new quad-core processors are changing the game in the data center (that’s NOT news), that this is considered one of the biggest launches in EMC history (how generic is that?), and some general information about massive scalability. The latter is also NOT news; just about all storage makers are offering huge scalability because next-generation hardware and software now enables it.

Okay, we agreed to an embargo about the specifics. Perhaps we crossed the line and didn’t realize it. But no specifics about what was making the news was mentioned. When any storage systems vendor has news, it’s going to involve “bigger, faster, better, greener.” Those are the parameters in this business at this time.

Some people at EMC were upset at such a media action. Nonetheless, when a protest reached my desk immediately after it posted, we agreed to bollox up the item and make it even more vague. Here is the result.

OK. Now it’s another day, Good Friday. Keeping all of the above in mind, here is what my colleague Jeff Burt posted earlier today on the eWEEK home page:

“Sun Readies Nehalem-Based ServersSun Microsystems will unveil servers powered by Intel’s new Nehalem EP processors at an event in Las Vegas April 14. At the event, Sun also will unveil its Open Network Systems data center strategy. Sun announced new enhancements to its Solaris operating system March 30 when Intel launched its new Xeon 5500 chips and microarchitecture, but waited two weeks before rolling out the new systems, which will include blade servers.“

So there it is. A tale of two media-relations strategies.

Some people will say Sun has a different agenda than EMC, but we submit to you it probably does not. Sun, a company that has been struggling for a decade, just wants to sell data center-ware just like everybody else. EMC, on the other hand, is No. 1 in the world in external storage and has been reporting double-digit revenue increases for more than five years, for gosh sakes.

Something is amiss here. Why is there so much defensiveness? There is way too much paranoia in certain high corporate places, and some people ought to look in the mirror for a minute and lighten up. Those folks know who they are.

Here’s wishing a stressless weekend to you!