They Say You Can't Be Too Thin, Too Rich Or Have Too Much Storage

Well, today's analogy in the high-tech industry is "storage." There simply is no other product, set of products or technology that is as integral to the future sales of everything else in high-tech as storage.

Forget about Windows. And Intel is just a chip company. Storage is what matters. This is as true in the enterprise market as it is in the midmarket as it is in the small-business market as it is in the consumer market.

The hottest product in the consumer space, bar none, is Apple's iPod. The iPod, of course, is nothing more than a portable server offering varying amounts of storage. The more storage you buy, the more songs and photographs you can carry around with you.

Hewlett-Packard, which is very aggressively looking for growth in the consumer market with a slew of new products, has its eyes squarely on applications for storage in the home. These applications are being driven by people's desire to digitize music and video, store it on a central device, and then move it around to any room in the house as needed.

With products like digital media servers, its own version of the iPod and hundreds of other devices, HP is betting it can leverage its technology footprint and business brand into the consumer market. And storage will be the key ingredient.

When you move into the small-business and midtier-business markets, the need for storage is even greater.

You've read in this column about Ted Hunter, the Brunswick, Maine, solution provider that offers a fully integrated solution that digitizes medical records for doctors. The central component is storage, of course, but along with the ability to move paper-based patient records onto spinning disks comes the need for other technology, especially security. And no digital storage solution is completely safe without a remote backup option that requires more storage.

One of the few places where we are seeing and will continue to see lots of new startups is in the storage space, especially with integrated products focused on the small-business and midtier markets.

If you move upmarket into larger corporations, there are plenty of storage-related success stories as well. In fact, storage is such a huge issue at every level that companies are looking for ways to reduce their ever-growing need for storage.

I can't seem to get through a week anymore without spending at least an hour cleaning out e-mail and attachments because I've exceeded the amount of storage allotted to me by CMP. I've asked for more and received it on several occasions, and yet it still doesn't seem to be enough. Because digital storage allows you to save more documents, you do so. Paper, on the other hand, clutters up an office and is more difficult to manage.

This year, we anticipate more advances in storage management, and over the next few years, we will continue to see dramatic improvements. We'd better, since government regulations are only increasing the demands on storage.

In the end, you can't be too thin, too rich or have too much storage. The question is, how do solution providers make money when storage is often viewed as a commodity? Well, the drives may be commodities, but the solutions around them are not.

Make something happen. I can be reached at (516) 562-7812 or via e-mail at rfaletra@cmp.com.