Looks like EMC is delaying the release of its next generation of CLARiiON and Celerra hardware, until sometime next spring, according to a Barrons report. The hold hints at EMC’s integration routes for the two products, possibly combining the two in some capacity.

EMC’s delay is a result of increasing pressure being placed on cloud companies, especially those that have consolidated several offerings to achieve some level of unified communications. For EMC in particular, the harmonization of CLARiiON and Celerra would make the company more competitive with NetApp, which is a strong leader in this market.

HP has also made a number of acquisitions the past few months, marking an industry infiltration that threatens others in the SMB space. “NetApp is the king of the unified storage hill and EMC, IBM and HP have been playing catch up with that level of functionality,” says Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante.

“Hitachi recently made some moves with its content cloud strategy but in general NetApp remains the leader for unified storage. The unification of block and file with the ability to support multiple protocols (CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FC, etc) through a single software management system – and an architecture that truly scales – is the holy grail of midrange storage and no one, not even NetApp is there yet.”

It’s the growing competition that seems to be a driving factor in certain cloud trends right now, and there’s no shortage of buyouts and partnerships, specifically for those in the unified communications space. But it will take some time to flesh this all out for the consumer base. Velannte shares his prediction;

“My bet is that like many industries several companies will arrive at a similar time including NetApp, EMC, HP, IBM and Hitachi. Right now the big marketing battle is between EMC and NetApp. NetApp has the advantage with simplicity, EMC has the advantage at scale. The bottom line is everyone is late in this space and users will have to be patient.”