Bill, I have absolutely no problem with this part:
The age of the million dollar mainframe is fast ending. However compared to the sub-1K PC market the commoditized server opportunity still represents a huge area of high-margin sales for INTC, CPQ, DELL, etc. Believe me, there is good business in selling endless racks of $10K-$50K ESN peripheral servers.
The split going to 80 - 20, in favor of storage over servers, still has me scratching my head, though. Seems that no matter how many petabytes or exabytes are shipped down the road, the value added, high margin parts (software, fibre connectivity, etc.) do not scale up with the overall amount of storage shipped (it doesn't take new data migration software when someone quadruples their storage, for example). The only part that does scale up exactly is the storage media, hard drive type stuff itself, which gets cheaper all the time with denser technology, mostly from IBM.
Not trying to be obstinate vs. your (or IDC's, heard of them too) predictions, just don't understand why most of the money is expected to go over to storage, especially with the server market exploding.
Tony |
