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VDC Authors First
Comprehensive Market Research Study on KVM Switch Market
September 30,
2002 -
Venture Development Corporation expects the keyboard video mouse (KVM)
switch market to rebound in 2003 after a slow 2001 and disappointing 2002.
A recently completed study on KVM switches in the United States, the first of
its kind, revealed that in 2001 the market reached over $380 million and is
expected to grow to over $800 million by 2006.
"The KVM switch market is closely tied to the overall market for
servers and IT," said Chris Lanfear, Director of VDC's IT Accessories
Practice, "but there are other factors that we see driving this market
including trends in high availability computing, the globalization of the
business enterprise and many others."
VDC's research examined both personal/desktop and enterprise/rackmount
KVM switches and paid special attention to developments in the KVM over IP
product area.
"KVM over IP is really the engine that is driving
the market at this time," said VDC's Lanfear. He added, "Enterprise
users are really seeing the value in having remote access to servers located
around the world. Having the ability to reboot a server in Taiwan from New York,
as if it were right there in the room, gives companies a tremendous amount of
control and the edge in their markets."
...VDC profile
See
also:- KVM
Switches |
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Europe's IT Distribution
Channels Face Another Difficult Year, Says IDC
PARIS -
September 26, 2002 - IDC's annual overview of IT distribution in
Western Europe warns that 2002 will mark another difficult year for IT
distribution channels. The decline in hardware spending is being exacerbated
by weak business demand and the prospect of a major upheaval following the
HP/Compaq fusion. In 2001, IDC found that the indirect distribution channels
experienced negative growth as the structural decline in hardware spending
coincided with fears of a global recession. Not only did the PC market register
negative growth but the long-term prospects for hardware infrastructure in
general appeared particularly bleak. Given the reseller channel's inability to
rapidly diversify its business model, IDC expects direct sales to increase from
54.1% of total IT spending in 2001 to 55.4% by 2005.
According to IDC's latest channels report Overview of IT Distribution
Channels in Western Europe 2001–2006 Beyond the Box, the indirect channels
handled almost 46% of the $282.5 billion spending on computer hardware,
software, and services in Western Europe in 2001.
IT spending in
Western Europe is expected to grow by 6.2% in 2002. Stronger growth from 2003
onwards is expected to yield a CAGR of 9.1% for the forecast period 2001–2006
and the IT market recovery should have a positive impact on the distribution
channels. IDC is forecasting a CAGR of 8.4% for the indirect channels between
2001 and 2006. Although the demand for infrastructure products will revive, the
bulk of this channel growth will be attributable to value-added activities based
on software solutions and services. IT vendors and their channel partners will
have to take account of this when drafting future business plans.
IDC forecasts that hardware's share of IT spending will fall from 35%
in 2001 to 27% in 2006. The PC share will decrease from 15% to less than 10%
during this period. Faced with a shrinking hardware market, the volume products
channel seems bound for a major shake out, with even some of the major IT
providers being forced to scale down or abandon their reseller activities in
order to cut losses. Several players in the volume channels remain incapable
of shifting towards higher-margin technical products or a more service-oriented
role. ...IDC profile
Editor's
comments:- it's a little known secret that some of Europe's biggest IT
distributors used to make make more money from acting as virtual "publishers"
and managing the promotional budgets for their principals than they made from
selling hardware. As there's been a recession in the IT advertising market,
distis have been hit with a double whammy, seeing the tastiest part of their
profit stream drying up. |
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StorageNewsletter Reports
on 199 Storage Start-Ups
Paris, France - September 26, 2002 -
In a recent market report, StorageNewsletter counted 199 start-up
companies around the world involved in storage.
"It's interesting to note that, given a fairly gloomy computer
industry, as well as a storage sector also in the doldrums, there should be so
many young saplings in which so much money has been invested," observed
Jean-Jacques Maleval, who directed the report. "It's the success in recent
years of companies like EMC, Network Appliance and Veritas that prompted this
infatuation, but there have already been some failures."
Statistical data shows that the typical start-up was founded in 2000
in San Jose, CA; its activities tend to be focused on storage software, and it
has raised an average $37.5 million in investment funding. This trend has been
slowing down: 67 start-ups were founded in 2000, a record year; only 18 in 2001,
and just one in 2002.
The total investment in all of the companies combined is greater than
$6 billion (in several financial rounds, up to as many as 9!), or roughly 10% of
the annual worldwide revenues generated by the global computer storage industry,
with record amounts for StorageNetworks ($205 million) and Sanrise ($203
million).
Geographically, 87% of these companies were founded in the U.S., 53%
in the State of California alone. Just behind the U.S. are Israel, Canada and
the UK.
"Given the current state of the stock market, these young
upstarts have practically no chance of attaining an entry on the stock exchange
for an IPO," commented Maleval. "The only way for founders and
investors is to find a buyer, generally speaking a computer heavyweight."
The most successful examples are NuSpeed, acquired by Cisco for $450
million, Highground, acquired by Sun Microsystems for $400 million, or
StorageApps, acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $350 million. The favorite
business activity of these start-ups is without a doubt software, as the
following table shows, followed by connectivity components and storage
subsystems:
- Software - 46.2%
- Connectivity (switches, controllers, etc.) - 24.1%
- Subsystems (NAS, SAN, etc.) - 24.1%
- Core technologies (optical, holography, etc.) - 7.0%
- Storage Service Providers (SSP) (1) - 4.5%
- Security systems for storage networks - 3.5%
- Storage via Infiniband - 3.0%
- Others or unknown (2) - 5.0%
* The total percentage adds up to greater than 100%, since
certain companies are active in more than one sector.
(1) Providers of managed storage-on-demand capacity, usually off-campus.
(2) Several start-ups are in "stealth" mode and prefer not to
reveal what business activity they are planning.
The study undertaken by StorageNewsletter, "Computer
Storage Start-ups", offers a highly detailed index of the 199 companies,
with the creation date, management team data, specific activity sectors, amount
of capital raised and names of investors. ...StorageNewsletter
profile
See also:-
Acquired companies,
Market research,
Venture funds in storage |
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Postcard Marketing Secrets
Offers Low-Cost Direct Marketing
TUCSON, AZ - September 25, 2002
- Since so many small business people struggle with marketing, and have few
promotional options that are affordable, Tucson entrepreneur Martha
Retallick decided to write Postcard Marketing Secrets. This
downloadable e-book shows small business owners how to create a low-cost
marketing system using direct mail postcards. Retallick is the owner of
Lrpdesigns, a Tucson-based web design studio that she says consists of "me,
a couple of computers, and a dog that comes to visit now and then." She's
been in the web business since 1995, and has been using postcards to promote her
business since 1996. Postcard Marketing Secrets provides the know-how to:
- Develop a mailing list without spending any money on list rentals
- Design attractive-looking postcards
- Write effective postcard copy
- Plan and implement a postcard marketing system
Complete with a
comprehensive glossary, index and listing of resources for postcard marketers,
Postcard Marketing Secrets offers easy-to-implement advice for small business
owners.
...Postcard Marketing
Secrets
Editor's comments:- Before 1996 when
ACSL switched to a
web format for our SPARC
Product Directory and we stopped all our paper based marketing, I spent many
years experimenting with traditional direct marketing techniques to sell our $95
directory and associated smailmailing lists. The postcard technique was the most
effective mailer.
To save cost and grab attention I used yellow card,
and just one printed color - black. The cards had the advantage that they didn't
need to be opened by the user (thereby saving the cost of preprinted envelopes),
were cheap to produce and we just printed our Royal Mail account number in
place of a stamp. So although MarketingViews is primarily focused on web
marketing, I thought I'd mention the news item above, because this simple idea
can save your company a bundle of money on design, print and mailing costs. And
if you hate checking proofs, that part is simplified too! |
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UCLA Professor Receives
Coveted J.D.C. Little Award for Best Marketing Paper
LOS
ANGELES - September 23, 2002 - Dr. Dominique Hanssens, professor of
marketing at The Anderson School at UCLA, has been selected as the winner of the
prestigious John D.C. Little Award for his marketing paper, "The
Category-Demand Effects of Price Promotions," published in Marketing
Science in 2001. Dr. Hanssens is also holder of the Bud Knapp Chair in
Management at UCLA. This marks Dr. Hanssens' second Best Paper award in
Marketing Science; he received his first in 1995 for "The Persistence of
Marketing Effects on Sales." His recent winning paper, co-written with
professors at Northwestern University, the Catholic University of Leuven in
Belgium and Tilburg University in The Netherlands, was the lead article in the
winter 2001 issue of Marketing Science.
Dr. Hanssens'
award-winning paper studies one of marketing's three primary sources of revenue
and profitability in consumer and industrial sectors - category demand.
Specifically, the paper analyzes to what extent marketers' actions - in
particular consumer price promotions - are related to short- term and long-term
changes in the consumer demand of a product category.
"Price promotions have increased in both commercial use and
quantity of academic research over the last decade, and most of the attention
has focused on their effects on brand choice and brand sales," Dr. Hanssens
said. However, he said that little is known about the conditions under which
price promotions expand short-run and long-run category demand, even though the
benefits of category expansion can be substantial to manufacturers and retailers
alike. article:-
The Category-Demand Effects of Price Promotions (pdf) |
|
Top 10 Products and
Services on STORAGEsearch.com
Editor:- September 23, 2002
- publisher ACSL revealed today the top 10 products and services that
readers were looking for in August on STORAGEsearch.com. Serial ATA is #1. For the full
list and analysis on the year to year trends see
market research |
|
| today's news etc from
MarketingViews | |
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high-tech internet marketing to news@MarketingViews.com |
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Other news on this page
VDC
Authors First Comprehensive Market Research Study on KVM Switch Market
Europe's
IT Distribution Channels Face Another Difficult Year, Says IDC
StorageNewsletter
Reports on 199 Storage Start-Ups
Postcard Marketing Secrets Offers
Low-Cost Direct Marketing
UCLA Professor Receives Coveted J.D.C.
Little Award for Best Marketing Paper
Top 10 Products and Services on STORAGEsearch.com
earlier news (archive) |
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Nibble Re: The Storage Software Industry is Still Using
1970s Style Control Theory
Why isn't the solid state disk
accelerator market already a 5 to 10 billion dollar market?
I was
asking myself this question the other day, prompted by Sun's disclosure at the
SunNetwork Conference in September that its next SPARC processor, due to be
shipping in systems by January, will once again be only a little bit faster, and
not a LOT faster as most of their server customers would really like.
The fact is that if you've already got your main servers stuffed up with the
fastest processors from Intel, Sun, HP, IBM or whoever, then installing a solid
state disk accelerator in the right place can often speed up the entire storage
network by 20 to 30 percent at a cost which may only be 10% or so of the server
itself. So by any measure that seems like good value for money, even in today's
cash strapped times. Of course solid state disk acceleration is happening
here and there, but not yet on a wide scale, and it got me thinking about why.
Part
of the problem is that it takes knowledge about where the bottlenecks are in
your system and that can change with every new release of your application
software. Although it's economic to buy the hardware side of the solid state
disk accelerator solution, the soft side still relies heavily on human experts
to make the speedup work. Without expert tuning you won't get the full benefit
of the expensive hardware, and in a worst case scenario might not get any
benefit at all.
That's a big risk for users to take. Users are
cautious and will want to trial the new technology or have performance
guarantees as part of their contracts.
Solid state disk manufacturers
are keenly aware that the shape of their sales ramp is limited mainly by the
number of their applications engineers until they can find ways to automate the
tuning process of discovering what's in the users' network, modelling it and
then optimising it. That got me thinking about how primitive the whole storage
software market really is in comparion to where it would like users to think it
is. Most storage software nowadays is designed around a control paradigm which
resembles heavy industry in the 1970's.
In the 1970's petrochemical
manufacturers used thousands of individual electronic controllers to
automatically control the opening and shutting of valves which controlled the
flow of liquids, gases, heat and other things flowing through the hundreds of
miles of pipework in a typical plant. The electronic controllers were a great
improvement on their pneumatic predecessors, because they could operate faster
and were less liable to jam due to dust or drift due to leaks. But a typical
plant still had to employ hundreds of instrument engineers and mechanical
fitters to keep the control infrastructure humming, and dozens of "board
men" whose job was solely to watch the thousands of meters and dials and
alarms and keep an eye on fluctuations before things got too much out of hand.
In the hierarchy the process people and control engineers were the gods who, in
their design of the plant and occasional tweaking, determined what type of
control strategy would be used, and the quality and repeatability of the end
product.
By the mid 1980's most of these heavy industries were on the
second or third generation of digital controllers which not only simplified the
collection and display of all this critical data, but also facilitated a new
type of control strategy based on SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data
Acquisition) systems. Eventually software would be trusted to keep an eye on
things. And as the systems got more reliable, process designers realised that
adaptive control systems could be entrusted to learn what was out there in the
plant, measure how it responded and optimise the control over a the entire
manufacturing process, not just for a single control loop.
Despite the
hype put out by companies like EMC about the abilities of their storage
management software we are still very far away from the ideal data storage
factory control model. Virtualization is a part of the jigsaw which will
eventually lead to an enterprise wide solution. But we're still very much at the
level of individual loop control which the oil business was using way back in
the 1970s. Your storage devices may be connected by networks but making sure
that everything operates together seamlessly to deliver data quickly when people
need it still requires a lot of manual intervention.
Until the storage
management software you run in your orgazination is intelligent enough to learn
by itself what kinds of applications you're running, and the characteristics of
your different types of storage devices, your ability to make the best use out
of new storage technologies will be limited by your own technical skills and the
amount of work and effort you are prepared to put into solving your own
performance and resource utilization problems. And having solved them once you
may have to still solve them again whenever you buy some new software or
hardware which changes the mix.
Adding a solid state disk accelerator
or tape library to your system is easy now. You connect it to the network and
click a mouse a few times. Telling it to find out what else is out there and
optimise its operation chosen from some sensible defaults for that kind of a
device should also be a one click process. Telling it to keep itself up to date
automatically when new hardware or applications are added should be just as
simple.
The challenge for the storage industry is to get out of the age
of manually adjusting individual control loops and processes and use tools
which are designed for operating a storage network like a data factory. When
that happens the solid state disk accelerator market is going to be a 10
billion dollar market, and a lot of other things are going to be affected as
well. The end point is to make all your computer assets work better for you,
and to make sure that in the meantime you avoid buying products which won't fit
in with the hands off storage management strategy.
See also:-
SAN - software,
Solid state disks | |
