Storage giant EMC had done a fairly good job adapting to the major trends in IT today. Its recent Isilon scale-out NAS video walkthroughs represent two of the freshest examples, along with all of the company’s other initiatives.

These include EMC’s recent partnership with Atos to create a joint venture that will offer hardware, VMware software and services to enterprises looking to cloud-up their IT. And of course, VCE. The latter, the provider of the Vblock converged infrastructure solution, is also a collaboration between EMC and VMware as well as Cisco, and in his latest article Dave Vellante looked into how far it gone in the past few months.

Last year both SiliconANGLE and Wikibon addressed a claim by Chris Mellor that VCE may not be doing as well as its behemoth sponsors hope. But that may not be the case in light of some new figures, publicly available now that the startup has grown enough to the point it is obligated to report them.

Vellante calculated that $480 million out of VCE’s $800 million bookings run rate can be attributed to EMC, which means that the storage provider may have a Vblock pipeline worth $1 billion by the end of this year –roughly equivalent of the figure behind Oracle’s Exadata DB appliance. And while VCE may not be profitable yet, Wikibon’s take is that it is nevertheless a very good investment from a broader point of view.

“Add in VMware and other services, plus partner services and the VMware/EMC ecosystem is looking much more attractive. Could VCE and its partners get 5% of the TAM? If so that’s a $20B marketplace for them to play in.

How much longer will EMC allow VCE to run at a loss? I think as long as they feel they can gain share, disrupt the market and secure new footprints.”