Source: Cloud Computing Journal
“Where have all the agents gone?” asks Seth Godin. Travel agents, real estate agents, etc. – all endangered species because people can more and more easily get what they want, or at least need, without them.
Are storage vendors middlemen? Some could be, and that’s not necessarily bad. There remains a place for irreplaceable “agents” that deliver what no one else can.
Those that see themelves in the middle need to look ahead and be sure that what they provide is something that IT can’t get further up or down the value chain.
IT storage is at its core about the care and feeding of data. Storing it, protecting it, dishing it out where and when it’s needed. RAID levels, deduplication rates and clustering strategies are secondary means to an end.
The Agent/Value question is worth asking these days as Cisco stirs the IT pot with a disruptive vision for data centers. It could be a shift as big as the one from Big Iron to the Client/Server model.
Personally, I think storage might be the one major technology category that sits next to Cisco’s commputer, but is not assimilated by it. Data feeds their model, but its care and feeding are not at the core of it.
What say you? Comments appreciated, as always.
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