The rush of available storage services from consumer giants like Amazon, Google and Yahoo is in direct conflict with the tides of traditional enterprise storage offerings; and it is about to send the storage business reeling. Consider the evidence. Long sales cycles with highly-paid direct sales teams versus the swipe of a credit card. Swarms of systems engineers creating value by supporting the development of highly scalable, resilient infrastructures versus invisible, virtualized, always-on resources made available with the click of a mouse.
Indeed, while many enterprise storage companies rightly see this as an opportunity, the threat is just as large. The highly publicized use of Gmail at Arizona State University to replace existing email services and Network Appliance gear, redeploy storage admin headcount and delight users by increasing storage mailbox capacities from 50MB to 2000MB is just one example.
Storage services have evolved from primarily media services to failed attempts at supporting online B2B applications to today's consumer-driven online storage services. Recently we've seen companies like EMC, Symantec and others respond by announcing the intent to offer services in the backup and archive space, clearly ripe for the storage services picking along with other read-oriented enterprise storage applications. The old adage of "lead, follow or get out of the way" surely applies here as vendors scramble to position and/or understand what this all means to their businesses. Unlike many traditional storage ecosystem wars, however, the pending storage services battles will evolve less around technology and more around marketing.
Action Item: To get a fair slice of the storage services pie, suppliers must aggressively embrace the online delivery of storage services, either directly or via strategic partnerships. Transparent pricing and usage metrics are 'table stakes.' Vendors must make marketing a key priority and source of value creation to accelerate adoption with clear concepts, naming, segmentation, packaging, pricing and positioning.
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