By Chandra Jacobs, Senior Marketing Associate, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division
What do Vblock and backup have in common?
To find out, I used a “word cloud” (or “tag cloud”) generator, Infomous—Infomous is a company that actually participated in EMC’s Inaugural Innovation Market in Nov 2012 (check out Sheryl Chamberlain’s blog on innovation at EMC to learn more). Here is the result of the word cloud focused around Vblock and backup:
Why a word cloud?
A word cloud is essentially a weighted list, but represented visually—the higher the importance of a given word, the larger the font size of that word. This can be taken to an even higher level, searching multiple words at once to see possible connections between them.
In our word cloud example, I did a dual linkage association to see how Vblock and backup are represented in current events (i.e., what’s in the news/what’s being discussed), to look at common terms (i.e. to get an idea of the importance of terms relative to each other and other terms in the conceptual cluster).
Related terms and concepts are linked together with lines so you can grasp the context of any relevant topic. Additionally, the clouds are organized in groups of related words–this provides you with a quick glimpse of the topics being talked about in the same context (or cloud).
In the case of our word cloud, we are only looking at a single snapshot in time (as of 1130 EST on Jan 22 2013) of what is in the news/”being talked about” at this current moment in relation to our two words. What’s great about word clouds is that they are dynamic and change with time, which make them a great resource for data analytic and data mining. Let’s dig in a little deeper.
But back to our story….What does the word cloud say about Vblock and backup?
When we see the Vblock cloud, what words are the most obvious? VCE, EMC, and infrastructure are all prominently featured, all connecting to the Vblock, all mentioned together at some point in recent news. EMC’s own Chuck Hollis is also associated to this word cloud, which makes sense, since he likes to stay at the center of interesting industry trends like virtualization and convergence 
.
As for the backup cloud, not surprisingly, we see that VMware and backup are being discussed a lot today, and there is some overlap between the two clouds around EMC and data protection, since EMC backup and recovery (Avamar and Data Domain Systems) is part of VCE Vblock System’s Data Protection Suite.
So, this is all good, but our customers need to see more of a connection going forward between the Vblock, VCE, EMC, data protection, and backup (and recovery), which can only be done through customer education, sound products and solutions, and clear marketing. We believe backup and recovery will be an even more important piece of Vblock Data Protection Suite’s strategy, so it will be interesting to see how our word cloud changes over the next 6 months—we anticipate backup and Vblock being more strongly coupled.
To learn more, be sure to register for our live webcast on Backup and Recovery of a Highly Virtualized Environment, on Jan 24, 1100AM EST Iit will also be available after that fact).
Finally, I’d love to see your comments on how YOU use word clouds in IT, in either an infographic, analytics, or FUN way (or all three, because who says infographics and analytics can’t be fun!?).
