Folks, this industry is BIG.

IT is a $3.8T (that’s T – for Trillion) industry.
Datacenter technologies and software are a $450B industry.
Storage is a $35B industry.

That’s big.  Ginormous.

It’s hard to remember sometimes.  I’ve been at Infinio for 2 ½ months and have tried to be really really focused on our part of the industry.  For starters, server-side cache, SSDs, software-defined storage, flash arrays, hybrid arrays, and vSAN.  Then also virtualization, including VDI.  Not to mention performance testing tools and benchmarks.

Sounds like a lot, right?

But it’s kind of like the first episode of Cosmos.  (Have you been watching?  It’s awesome.)  Neil deGrasse Tyson does this thing where he explains the scale of the universe, and it blew my mind.  We’re on a single planet in a single solar system in a single galaxy, and there are bajillions of all of those things.

Head explodes.

And our industry feels like that sometimes.  Earlier this week, Tim, a former colleague of mine, was in town and we had a chance to catch up.  A few years ago, we were selling Dell’s enterprise product line together, exposed to the same technologies: servers, storage, networking, and racks, power, and cooling.

A few years go by, and I’m in my corner of the industry, while Tim is selling Dell’s thin client technology to OEMs.  It was funny to orient each other to what we each did.  I felt a little tentative understanding exactly what he was doing.  Seemingly there was no overlap in our work.  And yet, I’d say we’re in the same industry – IT – and maybe even the same part of the industry – infrastructure.

The same thing happened at Citrix Synergy a few weeks back.  I figured I was going to a tradeshow in my own industry and that I’d generally understand the themes and announcements and be able to talk to the customers. I attended the keynote and I felt like it was a different language being spoken.  (Hello, Google!)

At the booth I was amazed at how much the customers cared about their users’ experiences with virtual desktops, and how little they knew about their infrastructure.  It’s not that the attendees were ignorant or lazy – on the contrary, I just learned there was a massive part of the industry with far more complexity and expertise than I knew existed.

The industry is big.  There’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of innovation, and a lot to learn.