Your point about getting the storage, networking and server teams to all agree on one platform is a great one. I expect that EMC and Cisco will use their enterprise sales forces to go above those teams directly to the CIO and make an ROI case for this platform. This will obviously work in some accounts and not in others. What is going to be really interesting is the degree to which traditional VMware channel partners (like your company) embrace this platform yourselves. I think this is at best a mixed bag for the VMware VAR community. What do you think?

I disagree with your assertion, for instance, that, “…from an economists [sic - economist's is possessive] perspective, there is really one and only one simple question…” First of all, rarely is anything having to do with economics simple. Secondly, the likelihood of all economists agreeing that the vBlock initiative comes down to a single question is about as likely as Obama winning the Nobel peace prize. Wait – that happened didn’t it? Still, very, very unlikely. The vBlock initiative could, for instance, be primarily a long term strategy to boost corporate confidence in a virtualized data center architecture that only incidentally translates to higher earnings per share someday down the road. Or other variables may be more important such as staving off competitive threats, helping the environment, etc. Even economists are not purely bottom-line focused.

IT decision-making tends to be project driven, based upon IT fiefdom requirements and typically tactical in nature. Even if vBlock is competitively priced compared to other solutions (something that I do not think at all is a given), the ability to get the storage, network and server teams to all agree upon a common platform is going to be very challenging – to say the least.