Originating Author: Dave Vellante
In many respects, IT storage organizations have been insulated from the market assault by high quality, cost-effective third party services. Networking, server hosting and application development organizations have all been impacted and forced to respond to market forces which necessitated dramatic changes in headcount, types of skills, and time spent around these increasingly service-oriented delivery systems. Attempts from so-called storage service providers (SSP's) in the late 1990's and early 2000's, that were trying to advance a vision of "Datatone," failed to make a dent on the status quo of storage services delivery within IT organizations.
All that is changing. Misguided attempts by SSP's to often target stateful block-oriented applications are being replaced by sets of pragmatic, low cost storage services from the likes of Amazon, Google, Yahoo and other consumer services firms going after the growing pool of unstructured data swamping organizations. In the immediate-term, storage organizations will be forced by end users to respond with much clearer positioning, packaging and pricing of both internal and third party storage services.
Action Item: IT storage organizations must assess cost structures, packaging and delivery and become more aligned with what's available on the open market. Storage organizations need to benchmark and model consumer storage service suppliers and invest in capabilities that provide clear, flexible pricing options and usage metrics under one IT services umbrella. Only then will make versus buy decisions be clearly driven by business value as opposed to inefficiencies in current storage delivery models.
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