The VCE coalition between EMC, Cisco and VMware, and the new joint venture Acadia, raise many questions that are not clearly defined in the coalition or new venture partnership. It’s appears they’re selling a vertical stack, like a reference architecture. I will assume based on the 3 vendors involved that the business model is high price, relatively low volume (meaning, they won’t target small business, mid-sized businesses), and they will focus on direct selling to government and large enterprise datacenters. That’s the only way (it seems to me) the large SIs could make enough margin to repeat this architecture in their business models.

And I’ll take your your bet – we ALWAYS have productive conversations with Dell, HP and IBM .