That was the comment made by Terry Keene, president of Enabling Technologies Group, at the recent IBM TotalStorage Solutions Press Tour held in Bali.
Keene urged customers to demand for storage on any platform and server with high-speed connectivity and the possibility to buy storage from any vendor regardless of existing server OS to break the cycle of 'closed' (rather than 'proprietary') source that some vendors use to lock-in a user to their products.
This, he says, provides little incentive for a vendor to innovate or to improve an existing product line when the vendor knows that a user is unable to use anything else.
-Data is the currency of the information age," Keene avers.
Keene was there as an industry consultant and analyst to provide an independent view on the state and roadmap for storage. His message for the attendees was that IT and storage should not become a commodity with prices falling and rising across the board for hardware, software and services. This would not happen unless there was growth of open systems and customers demanded it.
With speakers ranging from IBM's storage and services divisions as well as an industry consultant, attendees were bombarded with images and information regarding the plans that IBM has for data. While no major product releases were announced, what it did was to reiterate to the press and some 100+ customers, IBM's focus on storage.
Some 17 percent of total IT hardware spending in 2003 will be on storage, up from only 4 percent in 1999, according to IDC. The management of this storage will account for 7 to 8 times the amount spent on buying and installing that storage. This means that a company can no longer afford to treat data as a secondary concern.
Agreeing with Keene's prognosis, Bob Mahoney, VP of Worldwide Storage Networking Sales, added that information is becoming the new currency of the information age. Effective management of this information is vital to the success of any company. Mahoney went on to say that the storage, retrieval, management and distribution of this content would determine the success and failure of a business.
