Resellers Must Reposition in Stagnant Storage Market

DATE: 14-MAR-2005
By John Moore
Opinion: Compliance is one of the few sales levers still available in the storage market. VARs focusing on storage will have to use it effectively or change tactics to keep up with a market with high demand for space, but low growth in revenue.

A series of recent channel announcements share a common thread: the notion that regulatory compliance helps drive storage demand.

Executives at Arrow Electronics Inc. cited compliance as a force in the company's storage growth.

Electronic Data Systems Corp. said it formed an e-mail archiving alliance with EMC Corp. to focus on corporate compliance issues.

EMC's freshly minted solutions for medium enterprises and SMBs (small and midsize businesses) aim toward compliance as well.

"Regulatory compliance adds new urgency to the challenges of archiving," EMC's promotional literature states.

Other than it being the hot topic of the moment in corporate computing, why is compliance so popular with storage vendors?

It's one of the few sales levers still available in an otherwise-cool market.

Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and a host of other government requirements have contributed to storage demand.

But instead of adding impetus to an already robust sector, compliance seems to be one of the few things keeping the storage market moving upward.

Gartner Inc., for one, believes C-level executives are confining storage purchases to projects that lower operational cost and keep them in line with government directives.

In fact, there's not currently a single application or industry that looks able to grow revenue from RAID-based disk storage by more than "a low single-digit percentage," wrote Roger Cox, vice president in the storage research group at Gartner and lead author of Gartner's Global RAID Disk Storage Forecast, 2004-2007.

Next Page: Growth predictions.

Continue to:
Growth predictions

 


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