Would the real #3 in servers stand up?

During the era of Perestroika, while most of the leaders of the free world wanted to sit around campfires globally and sing “Kumbaya” , the Big Gipper remained the only level-headed leader, and asked for proof. “Trust, but VERIFY!” was the Gipper’s mantra. The request, IMO, made Gorby actually seek to implement Perestroika.

Sounds innovative? Well, not quite. See the footnotes below.

I really cannot believe this nonsense.

A few weeks ago, the IDC server numbers came out.

As I explained here, the factually incorrect rumors were that the reason HP flatlined was because of Cisco’s march into blade servers. Correctly decrypting the numbers, as opposed to the innumeracists who just parsed them, I debunked that theory.

And I thought that would be it.

When Kevin Houston, on his Blades Made Simple blog, decided to ask the question I posed at the very start of this post, some well-meaning Cisco employees (hey, I’m an optimist!) decided to weigh in.

According to one of them, last name Freund, commented that… well, I’ll snip the comment and paste it below for you to see.

See? Even if I had spent a whole night imbibing an entire flagon of the excellent Grand Marnier Cuvee du Cent Inquantenaire (150 Year anniversary) liqueur, I couldn’t come up with such nonsense!

Not only is he moonwalking away from divulging anything meaningful, he is also casting aspersions on the character of the blogger!

My reply (retort?), upon reading that inane comment, was swift, and I hoped, merciless. I wrote:

 

In my naiveté, I thought that would either put paid to this silliness, or entice them to ‘leak’ some numbers. I heard nothing else, so I moved along.

Until yesterday!

I saw a tweet from someone I am following

Which made me follow the link, and discover a whole page devoted to meaningless numbers, and choirboy parroting of Chambers’ spewed numbers as Gospel.

Nowhere is a number divulged. In fact, a read of the page shows that these people have no better information than you and I, and have taken to regurgitating the words they have been repeatedly told to the rest of us over and over!

You have to ask yourself where the hell Rod gets the numbers which he uses as the baseline from which he, Madamme Cleo-like, derives his prediction!

To separate Yours Truly from these cattle, I have decided to go somewhere with firm numbers, the Gartner Worldwide Servers report.

From the report, we can see the following vendors represented from numbers one through 13:

1. HP
2. Dell
3. IBM
4. Fujitsu
5. Oracle
6. NEC
7. Lenovo
8. Acer
9. SGI
10. Dawning
11. Inspur Electronics
12. PowerLeader
13. Depo Computers

The thirteenth server vendor on that list, Depo Computers, an entity I had never heard of prior to today, appeared on that list because of a 0.3% global market share position. That is 0.3% and on this list!

At this point, I decided to do a “Clara Peller”, and look around for Cisco’s numbers.

Errh, where’s the beef?

The number bandied around by Messrs.’ Chambers et minions is 50% of the number two vendor. In a year, no less! So, unless the next eleven OEMs are pulling a collective Rip Van Winkle, how is this going to happen?

However, in myopia eerily reminiscent of the malaise that brought down Novell’s NetWare, Cisco partners are not only drinking the Kool-Aid, but to my great annoyance, are spouting off the same platitudes as if they were substantive. Folks, it is nonsense! Moreover, it makes you look worse than a parrot; it makes you look like complete fools when you make statements and predictions based on banalities such as are displayed on that website. In addition, I am tired of reading of how Cisco does not divulge numbers to analysts. It is a crock, and all y’all should know better than try to feed me that excrement.

However, all is not lost.

Since I mentioned Perestroika earlier on, I want to revive another Russian phrase that might save this situation:

Glasnost.

Yes, Glasnost, or openness.

If you cannot do it for the analyst proletariat, do it for me. Place me under a permanent NDA, and show me the numbers. At that time, I would write a mea culpa on these very pages and all outlets I post on. I will be the first to apologize and correct the record.

Basically, all I am asking is that you, Cisco and all your mouthpieces either

Put up…

Or…

Shut the fuck up! Deleted on advice from a respected friend,

Shut up!

At the dawn of Christianity, the (future) Apostle Thomas, upon being told that Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, declared that he would need proof that The Redeemer was resurrected. He has been drowning in infamy since.

Disclosure: I am not, have never been, and by the Grace of God, would never be an employee of any of the companies listed above. I am however, a consumer of HP & Cisco products to great success, with HP being the primary client, printer, and server vendor across our enterprises, and Cisco for networking, both in our data centers and at client locations.