Omnifone and HP Partner to Distribute MusicStation Desktop
Earlier this week Omnifone and HP announced a partnership to distribute the MusicStation Desktop music service on 16 HP PC models in 10 European countries. The service will provide unlimited access to millions of tracks from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, and Warner Music International as well as leading independent labels. It will be preloaded on new HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario, and HP Envy models, and will offer a 14 day free trial. MusicStation will be available to users of new HP PCs in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, who will be able to download, play, and share tracks on their computer for a monthly subscription fee. Tracks are downloaded directly via the Internet to the PC for online and offline playback; subscribers can also burn 10 tracks a month into DRM-free MP3 files. The monthly subscription fee is �8.99 in the UK, �9.99 for Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, CHF14.95 in Switzerland, and 99SEK for Sweden.
OK, I am generally skeptical of subscription based music services since they rely on the customer having a sufficiently short music attention span such that the user is always seeking new sounds to replace the old. Otherwise, the user ends up paying rent for his/her music forever, which can far exceed the cost of purchasing the CD or other legitimate download, even in the overpriced retail music haven known as the EU. However, this partnership differs from past approaches whereby I think it might actually make financial sense to the user, especially if he/she is prone to purchasing single tunes as opposed to entire albums. Although the service is predicated upon playback on a PC, the growing number of media center PCs does somewhat blunt this shortcoming, however, the lack of an integrated portable device a la the iPod does place this at somewhat of a disadvantage over iTunes and other competitors. But on the other hand, this service does not require the upfront purchase of a portable media player and 79p/99cent per track charges and users can indirectly load their prepaid 10 tracks/month onto an MP3 player if they wished.
Granted, I have not been over the pond for a couple of years now, but even then an �8.99 CD was at best a discount label reissue of public domain songs from the Edwardian era. Hence the ability to burn 10 tunes a month from the major music labels for less than 10 quid is notable, and effectively positions MusicStation Desktop as a gigantic music preview service. As such, it could also help drive additional offline purchases including CDs, or other pay per song downloads, which would accrue to the labels� bottom lines. In the realm of popular music, especially for those in the younger demographic or those with an insatiable appetite for only that which is currently charting, this try it all and keep some of what you like approach may prove to be an good fit with the market; it might represent a new balance between the rent forever and buy it all up front schemes that exist today.
At the same time, there are other market segments where I do not expect to see much uptake. For those whose tastes tend towards the high-art end of the music spectrum or view the album as a audio mural intended to be enjoyed from start to finish, it seems unlikely that a piece parts approach to audio fulfillment would be well received. Further, the ardent audiophile is unlikely to consider digitally compressed music to be of sufficient quality, they might in fact still prefer the drop of the tone arm into a vinyl groove over even the best mastered DVD-Audio, let alone MP3 download. But then again, these are likely not the markets that Omnifone and HP are seeking with this announced partnership.
So overall, I think this musical partnership has a rational premise, and may prove to be well suited to certain market segments. It offers incremental revenue to the partners involved and record labels, and it is a low risk affair for the customer. In the consumer marketplace, this is a good balance between risk and reward. It will be interesting to see, er� perhaps hear, just how well it all plays out.
EMC, the Acadian Accomplices, and the Private Cloud
Once again I find myself the lucky recipient of the honorable identifier, AA 197 seat 22D, and as such have a few hours to kill in a rather austere low humidity environment. Thank goodness for my latest iDevice with its requisite collection of jazz, news podcasts, and noise cancelling headphones.
I have spent the last two days at EMC�s Analyst Event in the Boston �burbs; it was an interesting study in just how much the Hopkinton Storage Master has transformed over the past few years. A scant decade ago, EMC was easily summed as up Symmetrix plus the other stuff the company sold. High performance storage was the game, and in the booming best-of-breed focused 1990s, it wasn�t a bad fit. Of course the 1990s eventually ended with a resounding collapse of the marketplace that gave us rampant consolidation and retrenchment by much of the IT industry.
It was during these shaky years following that the focus and look of IT began to change as the distinction between servers, storage, and networking began to blur considerably. Not all that long ago the notion of the storage server was an oddity but IBM, then HP, and finally Sun began to embrace this blurring of purpose into their product lines. Yet today, this is an almost antiquated view given the transformative impact that virtualization has had across the board in IT. Perhaps some did not understand why in 1993 EMC, a storage company, would buy VMware, but today, this prescient purchase was an obvious underpinning for the transformation of EMC into something much more than that of a storage vendor.
Today�s buzz is all about cloud computing. At first blush one would expect that server and networking vendors would be the primary proponents, and for the most part they have been, but perhaps counter intuitively it is the far reaching embrace afforded the cloud approach by EMC that is most interesting. The recent announcement of the Acadia joint venture with Cisco, VMware, and Intel illustrates the degree to which EMC has embraced an internally controlled cloud as the future of enterprise IT. It was enlightening to hear the collective strategy of EMC and its Acadian Accomplices during the past two days; so much so that the relative lack of product announcements typical for such events was hardly noticed.
While many of the specifics discussed fall under NDA and thus are not to be repeated without the secret handshake, it was very clear from the event that EMC has focused its vision on delivering a new abstracted approach to the datacenter it has dubbed the Private Cloud. It is also apparent that this transformative message is more than buzzword saber rattling in that it not only seeks to depose the traditional silos of IT procurement (and the vendor community aligned therewith) but simultaneously cleverly engages the customer about what their business is seeking to do as opposed to how they do it. Who�d a thunk a �storage� company would transform itself into a thought leader for the datacenter with a vision that ultimately will obscure the mechanics of storage from not only the end user but most everyone in IT?
Readers know that I have taken issue with much of the �cloud dusting� in IT marketing as of late especially with respect to the notion of public clouds taking over IT as we know it in the very near future. However, much like in the early days of public Internet, the opportunity more rationally lies within the enterprise. The Private Cloud as articulated by EMC et al seeks to extend virtualization to its logical conclusion where all IT resources are dynamically provisioned from a pool of well described and understood resources under the control of the enterprise. It also seeks to transform a capital expenditure mindset into operational expenditure mentality which can also align more closely with servicing business objectives as opposed to technological deployment.
OK, this sounds wonderful, if not too good to be true; but enough gushing at the potential, let�s return to the ever present practical reality. Embracing the Private Cloud will take much more than technology, it will take behavioral change � the toughest product there is to sell. In a legal environment where compliance and best practices can install a sense of dread if not fear into most any LOB professional, the sanctity of information control is paramount to corporate success. I would argue this need trumps any cost benefits that internal cloud scenarios may deliver.
But to its credit, this is where the other multitudes of software acquisitions made by EMC over the past few years come into play. Unlike the other major systems vendors, EMC has put a razor sharp edge on information management, not just the storage equipment, but the information being stored. With ILM in the early 2000s, followed by management with Documentum, and security through RSA, deduping, and several others, EMC began to drive storage from the perspective of the information and its business value as opposed to a collection of hardware. Add to this mix the notion and virtualization, and primordial ooze of datacenter wide virtualization and abstraction begins to form. This ooze is non-trivial in its impact on IT attitudes, and it is not easily created; in fact it could be argued that the Acadia venture would difficult for any other combination of vendors to replicate.
The combination of EMC, VMware, Cisco, and Intel notably lacks any traditional systems vendor and services bureau presence. (Yes, each has some services business, but not in the big integrator sense.) Perhaps this lack is what has enabled the Acadian Accomplices to take a differing approach to virtualization and clouds bereft of the temptation to simply rename existing solutions as �cloud� without offering a transformative approach that focus on the information (and indirectly the applications) first, and the physical considerations of server, storage, and networking second. For example, HP�s announced acquisition of 3Com should bolster their networking credentials, but its combination of server + storage + networking does not articulate the same vision as Acadia.
There are many, many specifics that need to be worked out, and the evolution to the datacenter building block that EMC is driving will be a long one. This is not a flick the switch and everything is instantly different kind of endeavor. However, it is one with the potential to fundamentally alter how we view the datacenter, virtualization, IT provisioning, and oh yeah, storage. This is a strong message about virtualization that embraces all aspects of IT, not just servers, and focuses ultimately on the value of information and its enabling power to the enterprise. This is pretty dang cool.
