Counter-cyclical trends boost “value” storage companies now and later
My buddy in Sales is seeing an interesting trend. Some second-Tier storage vendors are doing relatively well right now, as long as some amount of credit remains available for them. Sales are holding steady, even increasing.
Why is that? Their customers don’t have money to spend of course, but their data continues to grow. They have to do something, so they’re foregoing expensive and service-contract-laden storage from the top Acronym vendors for cheaper storage systems that get them over the hump.
It makes sense if you think about it. McDonald’s is reaping a minor windfall right now from diners foregoing sit-down restaurants. People have to eat somewhere.
This could become more than a cyclical setback for the Big Guys if customers develop a taste for storage fast food.
Interesting post, Pete. This trend has been building for the past several months, and we’ve also noticed at Ocarina that companies that can help rein in a storage budget, such as those who increase available disk space, are benefiting. See my post: http://storageoptimization.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/whats-hot-in-storage-spending-less/.
Basically, storage budget is about getting a certain amount of capacity for a certain amount of dollars. For those dollars, you also want performance and features. When budgets are tight, it is true that people’s first reaction might be, okay, now I’ll have to go buy that cheap storage instead of the feature-rich stuff from my current vendor. An alternative, though, is to create that capacity on your feature-rich current vendor’s storage, by making that storage affordable through content-aware compression and deduplication. Most shops will find that they can free up at least half of their existing storage footprint with the use of tools like Ocarina, without taking any hit on performance at all…..and still keep their existing vendors, features, interfaces, and processes the same.
Thanks,
Carter George
Another proof point in support of your latest post.
Wal-mart just announced a 7% increase in revenues for the current quarter over the same period last year. Similar to your McDonald’s analogy, people still need to buy stuff, but they are doing it at Wal-mart instead of the high-priced boutiques.
Keep up the good work,
Wilson
Time will tell.
Clearly, storage has become a fundamental need in today’s economy.