IBM veteran charged with revamping storage business
URL:
news.cnet.com
Selected quotes, which I think reflect on the whole segment:
Storage is "the business with perhaps the most potential for improving revenue growth" at IBM, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman wrote recently.
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In the meantime, data storage has boomed with the rise of the Internet. Companies now need to deliver via the Web huge amounts of information to customers in digital formats ranging from text and graphics to sound and video.
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Typically, storage units are made of both hardware and software. They are separate boxes that supply information to servers, which in turn manage information flows to users on devices such as PCs or cellular phones. Forrester Research predicts a fivefold increase in corporate spending on storage systems in the next four years, even as the unit cost of storage declines.
(emphasis mine...)
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Sales of such units are projected to make up 60 percent to 80 percent of all computer hardware purchases within five years, said analyst Bob Zimmerman of technology consultants Giga Information Group.
(again, emphasis was mine...)
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"Right now, it's a skirmish (with EMC), and IBM doesn't have all the weapons it needs in its arsenal," said Wit SoundView analyst Gary Helmig, who has a "strong buy" rating on IBM and a "buy" on EMC.
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She's also focusing on a new and fast-growing storage technology niche called Network Attached Storage, where IBM is lagging because it doesn't yet have a product to compete with EMC. |
