They’re back…watch storage continue to grow

poltergeist1The hard drive market grew 11% in 2009 and is expected to grow another 11% in 2010 (in units) according to The Information Network.  At the same time, worldwide revenue from hard drives is expected to reach $27.7B this year. An increase of 18.4% says iSuppli in a recent article on bMighty.com.

Revenue seems to be growing faster than unit shipments if you consider the findings of both research companies. Does this indicate continued demand for higher capacity higher priced hard drives?  If so, what’s would be driving this demand?

I think it’s video.

Take the marketing segment as a small economic indicator for the use of video. According to a recent study by Unica, 83% of marketers utilize video or plan to utilize video as a marketing vehicle in the next 12 months to captivate, educate, inform, entertain, and influence customer decisions.   That means 83% of marketers will crave higher capacity to create, edit, store, share, and archive video. And video does not necessarily stay in one place. Companies store it locally on their network for employees, post it to their website, broadcast it on YouTube or Vimeo, share it in social media and with customers.  For every single video, it may be duplicated and/or stored on multiple hard drives.

The same could be said for consumer video.  Sure, consumers “broadcast themselves” on YouTube, but more than likely, create and store home grown video on their PC or external storage.  (This can also be considered marketing, but not captured in the study…personal branding is another topic for another day)

Video over the last 4 years has arguably been the single largest contributor to storage demand at the consumer level.

It appears it’s becoming the same at the commercial level as well.

As a storage guy it will be fun to watch.

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Everything video for SMB VARs in 2010
Real Estate – the next storage hungry vertical

2010-03-16T12:38:35+00:00

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