Well it’s Monday. St. Paddy’s is officially in the dust, my March Madness bracket couldn’t be any more kaput, and Apple surprised again with record breaking sales and dividends. Yes, I said dividends! The Mayans may be right! However, the rollercoaster of emotions I experienced this weekend were catapulted into space by good ol’ Sir Charles Barkley, a.k.a. Chuck, and EMC.
Seeing Chuck slaughter IT lingo and watching EMC/VMware on TV in the middle of March Madness was outrageously hilarious, yet surprisingly appropriate. In a day where literally ALL consumer technology is built to make our lives easier and more streamlined, the TV spot with CDW oversimplified why certain technology providers are doing better today than others.
What do Amazon, Google, Apple, Cisco, and VMware all have in common besides ungodly profits, skyrocketing stock prices, and consistently topping the technology charts?
SURVEY SAYS: They make our lives easy.
You can buy anything legal from Amazon. Google has actually become a verb. Apple is now larger than the entire US Retail Sector. Cisco is unifying and transforming lives. VMware has completely flipped an entire industry.
So I think back to that CDW/EMC/VMware commercial. All parties are incredibly large and successful, but to bring them together for a common initiative is a much larger beast. To me, the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. It’s bigger. Apple and EMC came together to make iTunes flourish, EMC, VMware and Cisco coexist to make IT flourish. Being a leader in an industry is not just about making the best products or having the most customers or taking share, it’s about taking your product or service, and combining it with another to transcend generations and fill the gaps that we did not know existed.
This same idea holds true for the individual. So, who are we working with?
DanWolkenstein 
…and more reason why ‘best of breed’ continues to flourish, customers want the best and best of breed providers need to deliver integrated solutions