A couple of reliable informants tell me the same story: EMC’s Atmos is in a fight for its life. Symm and Clariion sales people are treating the new born product as a competitor, not another EMC product.

The dozen or so Atmos sales people – yes, they have a tiny dedicated salesforce – are finding the well poisoned almost anywhere they go. Issues such as performance, stability, quality and future support of Atmos are reportedly being raised. Perfectly fair questions for any v.1.0 product – but they’re usually asked by competitors.

To be fair to the EMC field, the Atmos product web page is not up to EMC’s usual standards – a customer testimonial is conspicuous by its absence. Nor is there much on the business case for cloud storage.

Sales people don’t get medals for being the first to sell a radical new product. The experienced ones stay away until they get good reports from someone they trust. With Atmos that could be a while.

The StorageMojo take
In EMC’s famously sales-driven culture the local offices are used to doing as they please. As long as they make their numbers Hopkinton doesn’t mind.

But Atmos is different. Scale out architectures are the future of the industry and Atmos is EMC’s entry into the race. But EMC’s sales force doesn’t want to sell an immature product – or an architecture that will replace much of their current revenue with cheap commodity capacity.

The Atmos team is rumored to have a 1 year dispensation from making money or even many sales. That may need to be extended a couple of years.

At some point EMC’s sales force will need to get on board with Atmos. EMC better hope that some other scale-out vendor doesn’t get in those accounts first.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.