|
| Editor:- December 23, 2002 - I'd like to wish all our readers a Happy
Holiday and a Prosperous New Year. |
|
EMC, IBM, and
Hewlett-Packard Ranked 1, 2, and 3 in Brand Awareness and Preference in Storage
Solutions Market, Says New ITSMA Study
LEXINGTON,
Massachusetts - December 17, 2002 - Buyers of large-scale IT storage solutions
think first of EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, according
to ITSMA, a global advisor to companies that market and sell technology
services. ITSMA's study of market positioning and brand knowledge in the
fiercely competitive storage market showed that EMC is clearly top-of-mind for
buyers interested in purchasing storage solutions. More than one-third of
storage decision makers mentioned EMC without prompting, and more than
one-quarter said EMC is the firm they would most likely call for storage
services and solutions. IBM and Hewlett-Packard were the only other firms
mentioned by more than 10% of decision makers in ITSMA's survey of 300 IT
executives from large enterprises and government agencies.
"Brand
recognition is a critical advantage in today's storage solutions market,"
according to Lori Weiner, Senior Director of Research at ITSMA and author of
Storage Solutions: 2002 Market Positioning and Brand Awareness Study. "Buyers
are skeptical of new technologies and extremely conservative in investing in new
solutions, yet performance requirements for storage systems continue to
increase. The answer is often to consider offers only from the most prominent
and credible players."
In addition to the overall brand leaders, buyers gave high marks to a
number of other firms for strength in specific categories. Buyers relying
exclusively on network-attached storage rate Network Appliance and Dell highest.
Brocade Communications received the highest overall favorability rating of any
company rated in the study. Hitachi Data Systems showed strength in categories
such as storage consulting and SAN solutions. CNT and Veritas received high
marks for expertise in business continuity and disaster recovery.
Another finding of the study was that buyers show a modest but clear
preference for bringing together best-of-breed specialists over relying on
single firms that can provide one-stop-shopping for all their storage products
and services.
...ITSMA profile
Editor's
comments:- although the top 3 companies mentioned in this report have
consistently appeared in our top 10 lists measured by
storage revenue, only
one of the three actually appears in our recently published list of the
top 5 storage companies in
2002 measured by hundreds of thousands of reader pageviews. That's another
way of measuring "brand strength". As a dotcom publisher since 1996
I've found this method gives useful predictions and insights into who's going
up, and who's going down in future market share. |
|
To be effective,
advertising must be simple above all else
December
16, 2002 - an article today in the Memphis Business Journal by Mike
Ogden, president of Pipeline Marketing discusses the power and utility
of simplicity in advertising. There are some interesting examples in this
article. From time to time I get ads from our own customers which are either too
complicated:- try to pack too many ideas into the limited time and space of an
animated banner ad for example. Or I get ads which are just incomprehensible:-
because the words don't mean anything unless you already know all about the
company - which may be true for the creator of the ad, but not for most readers
on the receiving end. There are also some interesting ideas too on Mike Ogden's
own website. ...the
article "advertising must be simple",
...Pipeline Marketing |
|
Top 10 Storage Software
Companies 2002/3
December 12, 2002 - STORAGEsearch.com
today published the new edition of the "Top 10 Storage Software
Companies" list and reference article. There are four new
companies on the list, which is ranked by reader pageviews during the last 6
months.
"This is the definitive list of which storage software
companies our 0.5 million readers are most interested in" said Zsolt
Kerekes, editor of STORAGEsearch. "After our venture capital readers have
digested this article, I expect a number of companies not mentioned in this
list, to be put on the block for sale. The hardening of the top slots in two
successive years shows that many well funded storage startups are not going to
break through the glass ceiling and that the market is maturing at the same time
as adapting to important new technology trends." ...Squeak! - the Top 10
Storage Software Companies |
|
The Official Launch of the
MajorNewsWire.com Website
West
Hollywood, CA - December 10, 2002 – Today was the official launch of the
MajorNewsWire.com website. Major Newswire is a press release
distribution service delivering news through the primary news channels of the
world including wire, satellite networks, Internet and fax. Our services offer
the highest levels of targeted distribution available to the world's largest
wire services such as AP, CBS, Bloomberg, CNN, MSN Money, Nasdaq, NYSE, Yahoo
and Reuters.
Our custom programs will help you:
- Increase coverage
- Save money
- Expand distribution channels
Most of our clients save an average
of $1,200 monthly when they switch to our service. Major Newswire features over
150,000 media contacts in over 1,000 unique industries, press release tracking,
news and investment relations management, rapid press release deployment and
sliding scale discounts.
...MajorNewsWire.com
Editor's
comments:- internet based
news wires made a mint during the dotcom boom as newly launched companies
poured money into talking up their share prices with daily trivia. If the stock
market starts to recover we may see more newswires coming into the market. |
|
Email Spam Fear will Cause
Marketing Meltdown
London, UK –
December 6, 2002 – UK companies that strip e-mail addresses from their Web
sites over fears spammers will harvest the contacts, could be heading for a
marketing meltdown. That's the warning from Rainier PR, an agency that
has analysed the number of e-mail details for press, analysts and investors
removed from the Web in recent months
"Taking down your e-mail details because of concerns over
spam is like leaving your shop shut because you fear a burglary. In marketing
terms, companies that do so are facing a communication catastrophe," said
Stephen Waddington, managing director, Rainier PR. "Companies need to wise
up and take preventative measures, not bury their heads in the sand. Ultimately
this issue requires Government action, but in the interim, companies should
adopt intelligent software filters that stop spam from getting through," he
said.
Software management tools can reject spam from an e-mail server or
from an in-box. Increasingly though, users are opting to remove e-mail addresses
from Web sites altogether because it is the most straightforward approach. A
survey by Rainier PR of 100 corporate Web sites during November, and the six
previous months, found that 9% had removed e-mail contact details from their Web
sites during that time.
Rainier PR handles an average of 135 reactive media enquiries a week
on behalf of its 22 clients. 42% of these enquiries are directed via the
agency's Web site or clients' Web sites, with the balance by phone or
face-to-face. The use of a Web contact form, rather than publishing an e-mail
address is another way to counter spam. 12% of FTSE 100 companies take this
approach on their Web sites for journalist contact, whilst 20% take this
approach for investors.
- Don't post your e-mail addresses in public on a Web site or in a newsgroup.
Most spammers compile lists by using automatic applications that harvest
addresses from the Internet
- If you must post your e-mail address in public alter it, if possible before
posting such as firstname_surnameATrainierpr.co.uk or
firstname_SENDNOSPAM_surname@rainierpr.co.uk. Most people will know to remove
any annotation whereas computer harvesting software will not
- Use e-mail aliases on Web sites for press, investor and customer
communication such as press@rainierpr.co.uk and investor@rainierpr.co.uk, and
change them as soon as you start to receive spam
- Use an alternative e-mail address for non-business communication
- Never respond to spam, even to unsubscribe. Spammers use returns to confirm
that an e-mail address is in use
- Review all user agreements before signing up for Web based services. You
may discover that you are signing away the right for your e-mail address to be
circulated onwards
- Consider using contact forms, preferably in Java script, as an alternative
to publishing e-mail addresses on your Web site
- Avoid posting information on how to generate your employees e-mail
addresses such as firstname_surname@rainierpr.co.uk
- Introduce unstandardised personal e-mail addresses at your company,
intial_surname@rainierpr.co.uk and first_name_surname@rainierpr.co.uk and
surname_intial@rainierpr.co.uk
- When registering your web site, provide general e-mail addresses for domain
administration, technical and billing contacts
...Rainier PR |
|
DoubleClick's Third Quarter
Ad Serving Trend Report Reveals Continued Sophistication Among Marketers Using
Online Advertising
New
York - December 5, 2002 - DoubleClick Inc., the leading provider of
marketing tools for advertisers, direct marketers and web publishers, today
announced results of its third-quarter Ad Serving Trend Report, based on more
than 144 billion ads from thousands of clients. The data reveals that online
advertising continues to prove its effectiveness for marketers.
The
data reveals that more than 73% of all campaigns incorporated some form of
targeting criteria in the third quarter. The fact that only one quarter of all
ads served are run-of-network attests to a continued sophistication in the
online planning process. Furthermore, keyword and key value remain the most
common type of targeting used by advertisers with 82% of targeted ads. This
includes both keywords on search engines served by DoubleClick and content
targeting on specific sites. Marketers have used geographic targeting in 12% of
all targeted ads, and targeting by time of day is now 3% of all targeted ads
served.
The data reveals that the use of IAB standard sizes has held steady at
nearly 70% of all ads served, which makes online advertising much easier to
implement across a range of sites. Specifically, skyscrapers now account for
more than 7% of total volume, a 67% increase from the first quarter. The
standard 468x60 pixel banner is still the most popular, accounting for nearly
50% of all ads served.
As a result of better planning and more dynamic
creative, average click-through rates remained constant at around 0.7%
indicating an increasing maturation of the industry. In addition, view-through
rates - which assess users who convert within 30 days of seeing an ad, but do
not click on a banner - have risen from .36% in the first quarter to .51% in the
third quarter. This translates to five consumers per thousand who respond to an
ad that they do not click on. As a result, marketers who use click-throughs as
the only response metric are missing these conversions. ...DoubleClick |
|
Online Advertising
Projected to Rebound in 2003
New York, NY -
December 3, 2002 - According to eMarketer's just- released Interactive
Marketing: Stats, Strategies and Trends report, after two straight years of
decreasing sales, US online advertising will begin recovering next year, slowly.
According to eMarketer projections, 2003 spending will rise slightly to $6.70
billion, up from $6.38 billion this year. The expected bounce-back is due to a
combination of factors, including traditional marketers devoting larger slices
of their ad budgets to online advertising as well as a general easing of the
economic recession. By 2005, online ad expenditures will hit $8.10 billion-still
less, however, than 2000's spending of $8.23 billion.
"The last
two years were a disaster for online advertising," says David Hallerman,
Senior Analyst at eMarketer. "The fact that 2003 is going to be a growth
year, even a small one, is good news."
...eMarketer.com |
|
ACSL Commemorates 11 Years
of Publishing
December
2, 2002 - this month ACSL, publisher of MarketingViews , commemorates
11 years of IT directory publishing.. ACSL's first publication was called
the "SBus Product Directory" and was aimed at buyers in the Sun
Microsystems market. By the time it switched to the web in 1996, the paper
edition weighed several pounds and ACSL changed its name to the "SPARC Product Directory"
to reflect the fact that other busses, including PCI were also being used in
SPARC systems.
Although the Sun market has shrunk from its revenue
peak at the height of the dotcom boom, the installed base has continued to grow
and the readership of the SPARC Product Directory has also grown as other
publishers have dropped out of the market. It's now the longest surviving Sun
focused publication.
ACSL's flagship publication today, is
STORAGEsearch.com, the mouse site,
which was first launched in the summer of 1998. Within two years it had
overtaken the SPARC Directory readership, and today has a readership which is
more than twice as large (significantly above 0.5 million readers).
Kerekes
concludes "...We've proven that a company which is 100% web based can be
profitable and survive even in the toughest market conditions." ...ACSL profile,
...SPARC Product Directory,
...STORAGEsearch
Editor's
PS:- ACSL originally launched this site, MarketingViews, in 1996, as an
ezine and web site to help its customers make better use of snail mailing lists
in the Sun market. However, as our own business shifted entirely to the web we
stopped selling mailing lists and traditional offline marketing became
increasingly irrelevant to us and our marketing readers. So we suspended
MarketingViews in 1997. Another factor was there weren't any real experts in
web marketing in those days, and the real experts were too busy trying to make
money on the web to write any articles about it.
For a couple of years
I wrote the occasional article about web marketing and co-edited a small
marketing web site for my wife's marketing
training business. Then in 2001, I decided to resurrect the MarketingViews
publication with a different concept. The site would mainly contain reference
info about PR and web advertising which might be useful to ACSL's customers, and
would also include any other content about marketing that I found interesting.
The new business plan was that "there wasn't going to be a business plan."
As long as our computer publications were making enough money and I and some
customers found MarketingViews interesting and useful, then that was enough
justification. In fact MarketingViews does have a small readership approaching
20,000 readers, but we still have no plans to sell advertising. |
|
| today's news etc from
MarketingViews | |
| send press releases about
high-tech internet marketing to news@MarketingViews.com |
|
Other news on this page
EMC,
IBM, and Hewlett-Packard Ranked 1, 2, and 3 in Brand Awareness and Preference in
Storage Solutions Market, Says New ITSMA Study
To be effective,
advertising must be simple above all else
Top 10 Storage Software Companies 2002/3
The Official Launch
of the MajorNewsWire.com Website
Email Spam Fear will Cause Marketing
Meltdown
DoubleClick's Third Quarter Ad Serving Trend Report Reveals
Continued Sophistication Among Marketers Using Online Advertising
Online
Advertising Projected to Rebound in 2003
ACSL Commemorates 11 Years of
Publishing
earlier
news (archive) |
|
 |
Advertising
on
STORAGEsearch |
| When
Cheaperbyte's sales manager said he had to accelerate sales in 2003, he knew
just the right way to do it. | | |
|
|
Nibble: Is
the External Disk Market Heading for a Crash?
Two recent market
research reports got me questioning the validity of my own assumptions about the
long term prospects for the that part of the storage industry which supplies
disk based storage such as RAID, NAS, SAN etc. And I'm starting to feel a cold
chill which has nothing to do with the seasonal weather.
First it was
the December
6 news from IDC saying that worldwide disk storage systems factory revenue
in the third quarter of 2002 was down 3% compared with the second quarter. "The
failure to gain revenue momentum in Q3 is yet another indication that a rebound
in the disk storage systems market is not imminent," said Charlotte
Rancourt, research director of IDC's Disk Storage Systems program. "The
third quarter is consistent with an emerging trend whereby growth in gigabyte
per unit does not offset the unrelenting decline in dollar per gigabyte."
Then there was the December 10
report from Peripheral Research Corp saying that the demand for critical
components for rigid disk drives hit a five-year low in 2002. "The industry
has been on a 60-100% per year increase in areal densities, which by nature
reduces the number of Magnetic Heads and Disks in each drive... The demand for
Rigid Disk Drives has flattened out to about 195 million units per year for the
past three years." This report went onto say that growth in demand
for disk drives in consumer products would eventually lead to growth in overall
disk shipments, but that doesn't affect the computer market which we're
discussing here.
Let's recap on the two main reasons that so many
computer companies flocked into the storage market in 2000 and 2001 during the
recession in the PC and server market.
The first, was a widely held
belief supported by direct experience, and codified in a widely publicised
EMC
sponsored research study saying that the demand for storage capacity would
double every year. The second factor was the growth and profitability of EMC
back in 2000. Both factors, taken together suggested to many oems, that here
was a market which was ripe and growing, and in which there plenty of
opportunity for efficient low cost producers to make higher profits than in the
PC market by undercutting the fat dumb and happy market leaders. News travels
fast in this wired world. So hundreds of companies had exactly the same idea.
But
what if these assumptions are wrong? Or don't give the whole picture? What if an
annual doubling in demand for disk storage doesn't actually lead to any
increase in storage revenue? And what if an overcrowded market of EMC wannabes
leads to the same fierce competition and pricing models seen in the PC market?
That's good for users but spells ruin for many storage oems.
In the
semiconductor world Moore's Law has reliably predicted the shrinking geometry of
chip and the growing density of memory for 3 decades. There isn't an equivalent
in the disk storage world. But looking back at the last 10 years, disk drive
capacity has increased by a factor of 1,000, which means that on average it's
doubled every year. So even if demand for storage is doubling, there's no
compelling reason for the market to increase in value. In fact, if you take
into account the new wave of intelligent archiving software from companies like
Princeton Softech
there are optimistic grounds for believing that users will be able to keep a
lid on runaway storage growth by using more compression and faster intelligent
archiving based on data usage patterns.
If disk storage technology
keeps improving, users could end up paying less for their storage networks in
the long term, instead of more. Now there's an interesting thing to think about
as we ponder what the new year may bring.
See also:-
...EMC profile,
...IDC profile,
Market research,
...Peripheral
Research profile | |
