Do you remember Douglas Adams and his, most famous, novel? (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) Well, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42! (and not 62).

Apart the joke, the only thing we can see after an year of blogsjoin ventures and advertising is the numbers: 62.

62 is the number of the vblocks (CISCO+EMC+VMWARE preconfigured and integrated stacks) customers world wide!
To me, 62, is a very (very) little number, what do you think?

My concerns aren’t about the stack itself and his quality but on the customers perception: are we sure that customers want integrated stacks? Probably customers like end-to-end certified solutions and CISCO+VMWARE+EMC is one of these but they refuse to have a single vendor to avoid the lock-in!
I’m sure that there are many more customers than those 62 who buy certified and integrated VMware+EMC+CISCO stacks but not vBlocks.

*This figure of course is not coming from an official press release but from a Tweet coming from @vStewedthat I saw today on my Twitter stream.