Posted by Damien Bowersock on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 07:13 AM
As a storage junkie, 2009 was the year of
deduplication. With the
well-publicized bidding war between EMC and NetApp over Data Domain, the big
boys finally validated the value of reducing your storage footprint. 2010 looks to be more of the same. It's not news that the economy is in
the tank and everybody is feeling the strain of budget cutting. Any way that IT organizations can
reduce their spend and shorten ROIs will be beneficial in the near future. Here are a few predictions for the next
12 months:
1. Channel partner programs will be stronger
than ever. With large vendors
continuing to reduce the field sales forces to grow the bottom line, new paths
to market will be important.
Therefore, channel programs will continue to grow and expand the options
available to resellers. Likewise,
vendors will be asking channel partners to carry more of the load in the pre-
and post-sale process.
2. Channel partners will need to be careful
with their customer base. Times
are tough. Big company, little
company - it doesn't matter. Watch
out for vendors taking deals direct to accelerate the sales cycle. When that happens, look for replacement
vendors that can fulfill the same need and guarantee your mutual success.
3. Deduplication will move beyond backup and
archive. Historically, the
only company to successfully leverage deduplication technology outside of the
backup and archive world is NetApp.
ASIS paved the way for new vendors, such as GreenBytes, to provide high
performance dedupe in virtual machine storage. Performance constraints that have typically plagued
deduplication engines are beginning to disappear. It would not be surprising to see a potentially
"game-changing" announcement from more than a single vendor this year.
Let's see how this pans out. It could turn out to be an exciting year in the storage
market.
Next Week...
GreenBytes Goes Global!