Jonathan Schwartz at Sun shocked no one a few days ago by announcing that Sun has decided to do a reorganization. Well, stop the presses!

It turns out that Sun is going to fold the Storage group into the Server group because it realizes that what they sell is a “System”. Time to re-think this whole business, and as Mario Apicella wrote, watch out EMC, NetApp, and all of us littler guys like Pillar. The times they are a changin’.

Yes this is the kind of rock-your-world announcement that can have you staring at the bottom of a bottle, wondering how the rest of us missed such a critical observation and organizational structure. Well, the rest of us except IBM, who has done this at least three times in the last 15 years. And every time IBM did it, they subsequently un-did it.

Why? Because a company’s organizational structure depends on how they view their business rather than technology or the needs of their Customers. Organizations aren’t products; they should be immaterial to the Customer.

Perhaps Steve Duplessie said it best when he said, “Whoopdie Doo” in his normal eloquent fashion.

Server people look at storage as “clothing” for Servers. Storage people look at storage as well, storage. The storage industry is quite large, and storage companies and storage divisions of larger companies look at the total available market (TAM) as their customer base, not just the part of the TAM that has their company’s Servers, or Switches, or whatever in it.

So in the end, if your company’s attach rate is say, 30%, meaning that 30% of your servers are sold with your own storage instead of somebody else’s, you could argue this two ways: 1) Build a better storage subsystem to improve your attach rate, or 2) Sell your storage product on everyone else’s server’s in addition to your own since that is a lot larger opportunity anyway.

Both of these arguments are reasonable, hence the shuffling around of these groups inside companies like IBM and Sun. The truth is, the shuffling has more to do with internal politics, Sales force structure, and business growth targets than it does with some technological shifts or customer requirements.

Perhaps my annoyance is too obvious, but for crying out loud it seems like the internal machinations of our companies are not really relevant to our Customers; it is goods and services that matter. Who reports to whom should not matter: If it does we have gone nowhere because all storage manufacturers were part of their respective “server” (read computer mainframe) groups 50 years ago.

Mike