Do CEOs of Collaborating Companies Talk to Each Other?

I guess there is room for all kinds of corporate behavior. In EMC: Enterprise data centers won't all flock to the cloud, where we learn about new storage solutions — called VPlex — from EMC, we also learn the following:

Tucci also criticized the data center verticalization strategy that companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Cisco are taking, saying it will lead to a new kind of lock-in that will ultimately lend itself to inefficiency. He said EMC’s private cloud strategy swaps out verticalization with virtualization and allows all of your data center solution providers — even EMC competitors — to plug in.

Now, you will recall that the Virtual Computing Environment collaboration was setup with good amount of fanfare: Power of 3 - VMware, Cisco, EMC and so on. You would think that there is a better way for EMC to promote the launch of VPlex than to deride a collaboration partner, in this case Cisco, right? Wrong. EMC finds it necessary to talk down Cisco.

The power of a coalition such as the VCE lies in the integration and the attendant advantages: data centers can deploy well integrated pieces rather than waste precious time in stringing together components: servers, networking, storage.

I guess it takes corporations of all kinds to make up the world.