Few people are surprised when they hear our IT organization at EMC has embraced Private Clouds. After all, it’s easy to embrace a vision. It’s another to actually pursue it. But when folks learn how aggressively EMC IT is transforming our current datacenters into a private cloud, I often get reactions along the lines of, “Wow. Eating the food you’re selling to the rest of us. Great move.”

After this sinks in a bit more, I’m often asked: “Wait a minute. How did you manage to make that happen?” One assumption underlying this question is that we’re willing to bet more than merely EMC’s IT-vendor business on Private Cloud. We’re willing to bet our business operations on it.

That’s true enough. We are.

Another frequent assumption is that EMC is haughtily taking operational risks to meet a technology or marketing goal. That one badly misses the mark.

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Here’s a phrase you’ve undoubtedly heard far too often: “A major shift in Information Technology is coming.” Most of the time, it’s used merely to introduce some vendor’s new product or technology. It’s also been used to hail the coming of cloud computing and, more recently, private clouds. Cloud proponents—EMC included—love drawing analogies to previous technology waves that transformed business IT.

But let’s be clear about the driving force behind those waves. It was not technology. Each wave hit our shores when new ways were found to address a common and persistent problem: businesses’ need to develop and run applications more quickly and more flexibly than possible using then-conventional means.

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