It’s March and across the U.S., wild weather continues—winter heat waves on the East Coast, record snowfall and cold in the West. What is an atmospheric river anyhow? People love to talk about the weather. Why? Because it’s common ground in a world where there’s frankly too much emphasis on our differences.
People also find common ground on the topic of money: how to make it, how to save it, how to spend it. IT teams are no different in this regard and one major theme for 2023 so far has been how to avoid unnecessary expenditures. How to do more with less? The first item in this occasional blog on industry news speaks to the opaque nature of data storage spending.
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Seesaw Storage Vendor Revenues
Chris Mellor, editor of Blocks & Files, wrote about the storage supplier market which has been partly affected by the global economic downturn. While Micron, Western Digital and Seagate have seen revenues spiraling downward, other data storage vendors are seeing healthier outlooks: “NetApp is slowly distancing itself from HPE in storage revenue terms, though both rise above the rest. Three suppliers are edging towards HPE – Pure, followed by Snowflake and Nutanix, which has been overtaken by Snowflake.”
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Cloudy Decisions on Cloud
Similarly, there are opposing trends going on in cloud storage right now. Our CEO Kumar Goswami wrote about the Bulls and Bears on cloud adoption in his recent blog. The big cloud players have all seen softening revenues per CNBC as customers pull back on cloud spend after being burned on pricing. Yet in his second blog on how to optimize cloud spend, Kumar offers ideas on how to maintain an active cloud transformation journey while still being extremely cost-efficient.
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New Things to Ponder in IT Land
It’s no fun to spend all day on the tactical. Below we’ve gathered a few new ideas to help your organization keep moving forward, even during times of high uncertainty.
Top IT Job: Serial Specialist. IT leaders are weary of the ‘war for talent, says Deloitte’s chief futurist, Mike Bechtel, as interviewed in ERP Today. “The treasure hunt for the mythical 10x engineer is time consuming, and if you’re lucky enough to finally find her, you pay a queen’s ransom. Marry that up with our further research finding that the average lifespan of emerging tech is down to 2.5 years, and you have an unattractive proposition: You need a new superhero all over again.” So the new type of ideal tech worker is a “Serial Specialist” who can quickly get up to speed on a new technology and crush it and then in a few years move on to the next big thing. These are people who demonstrate a high degree of “aptitude, attitude, and curiosity,” Bechtel explains.
Multi-cloud isn’t easy: you need the metacloud. As David Linthicum defines it in InfoWorld: the metacloud is really a cross-cloud service layer that exists so we won’t have to define specific technologies for each public cloud that’s part of our multicloud. It solves a few problems, such as reducing complexity so that we’re not doing redundant things such as working with specific native security technology within each cloud provider.”
The metacloud will be increasingly important yet tricky to mainstream since big vendors always want to protect their revenue streams. Says Deloitte’s Bechtel: “They’re understandably committed to incentivizing folks to maximize – or at least optimize – their time spent on their own platforms. That said, interoperability is always table-stakes, and the more that leading vendors provide in the way of shared interop, the less demand they’ll end up conceding to third parties.”
Spend on stuff that saves money. Even if you aren’t facing IT budget cuts in your organization, if you can save money in a commoditized area like storage or networking, you can spend more somewhere else that can deliver real business value such as big data analytics or customer experience technology. Forbes surveyed some business leaders on new tech-oriented ideas and the concept of tech-driven efficiency topped the list. “There will be more artificial intelligence and machine learning developments related to automation and optimization, multicloud architectures, and FinOps, as well as more self-service digital products.”
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Komprise News: Introducing Komprise Analysis
Komprise Analysis Subscription: In the vein of saving money, Komprise just announced a new Analysis-only subscription so that IT organizations can get insights on data such as data growth rates, top file types and sizes, storage costs and usage trends—without purchasing the full platform. Komprise Analysis also helps IT understand data better to improve compliance and support departmental objectives. Read the press release here.
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Analyst Steve McDowell covered the news on Forbes:
“What I like most about the new Komprise Analysis offering is how it helps IT organizations control storage costs. The tool allows you to model the financial impact of different data management policies and cost models to help IT administrators make the right decisions about their data.”
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SearchStorage reporter Tim McCarthy also covered the news: “Komprise wants to take the management guesswork out of moving customer data without demanding a full commitment to its software suite.” Read the article here.
Chris Mellor wrote in Blocks & Files: “The beauty of this is that you can pretty much immediately see if it’s going to be worthwhile buying Komprise’s software for hierarchical storage management functionality.”
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