Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) risk being caught without
the means to manage their storage if they let themselves be lured
by enterprise-class products with entry-level price points.
Nearly 45% of SMBs recently surveyed by research firm
Gartner named storage as a top hardware purchase initiative in
2007. Many will buy high-end systems in an attempt to get a handle
on their exploding storage demands. But experts warn that a
high-end system alone, without services support, can leave some
businesses with systems they can't afford to manage.
 | | | | | Wrapping services around
technology because it can offload work so that the business can
concentrate on its core function, that's a good thing.
Greg Schulz
founder and senior analystThe StorageIO
Group |
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"If you look at the volume of information that companies are
storing -- and it's been growing by 30% to 50% per year the last
seven or eight years -- even small businesses are acquiring amounts
of information that would have been difficult for a large
organization to deal with just a few years ago," said Charles King,
principal analyst at Pund-IT Research.
King said SMBs just don't have the resources or IT skills to
manage their data storage needs.
As a result, King sees an explosion of the IT services business
as more SMBs demand products that will "take the management burden
off deploying all this stuff."
IBM is one of the first big-name vendors to offer
enterprise-like products to medium-sized companies, sells services
-- and it makes a lot of money doing it.
IBM Global Services (IGS) has become the
company's largest division, with more than 175,000 employees. It
generates more than 40% percent of the company's revenue.
IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano, speaking this week at
PartnerWorld in St. Louis, called on
partners to help grow its SMB business and predicted that the
midmarket would become IBM's largest customer segment within
five years. Already, IBM's midmarket sales are poised to surpass
its financial services business, according to reports. Providing
services to that market segment could indeed throw IBM over the
top in sales, experts say.
"I think what's happening is customers in the midmarket are
starting to feel the same pressure that our high-end customers have
been feeling for a long time," said Elaine Lack-Dompka, SMB and
channel chief for storage products at IBM. "There's a huge
opportunity from a partner perspective. They're really seeing
customers saying, 'Help, I need help with my data management and my
compliance issues.' Some of these solutions can be bundled around
implementation services."
Rob Marten, an account executive at Mainline Information
Systems, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based channel partner of IBM, said
SMBs need help with some fundamental issues, such as protecting
data, retrieving information and scheduling backups.
"When you think about the amount of data that just keeps
increasing at a very rapid pace, management of it is ongoing,"
Marten said. "It's not just a one-time thing in service
engagement.
Vendors selling storage hardware priced for SMBs do indeed have
an opportunity to sell services with their channel partners, said
James Browning, vice president and research director at
Gartner.
"I agree that if you just take a raw NAS device or a basic SAN,
resellers can go in there and wrap services around a storage
infrastructure," Browning said. "But I think there's a trend
occurring on the other side."
Some vendors are taking another approach by selling storage
hardware that's easier to use and requires less specialized
expertise from IT staff.
Browning said other vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP)
and Network Appliance Inc., are offering SMB storage devices that
are not only priced for the SMB market, but they're also designed
to be easier to manage.
HP, for example, introduced in September its
StorageWorks All-in-One (AiO), a storage
system designed to be installed in less than 30 minutes -- or
fewer than 10 clicks. The system takes an integrated,
application-centric approach to storage by combining
network-attached storage (NAS), an
iSCSI storage area network (SAN), data
protection and storage management. Through a series of
configuration wizards, users are able to migrate data from a
direct-attached Exchange storage server to networked storage on
the AiO by following a seven-step guide.
Browning said most SMBs lack storage expertise among their IT
staffs. But all of them have plenty of expertise with the
applications they use.
"If you look at the capabilities in the IT staff of a smaller
business, they don't have the storage skills or the security skills
or the network architecture skills," Browning said. "They are more
generalists, but they understand the applications."
By building an interface at the application level, these vendors
are allowing SMBs to upgrade their storage without upgrading their
staff.
Either approach has merit, say experts. But what businesses
don't want to do is get caught up in buying a product that requires
services because the product itself is just too complex to
manage.
Whether a business buys into the services approach or the
ease-of-use approach depends solely on what the company finds most
valuable to its overall business, said Greg Schulz, founder and
senior analyst of The StorageIO Group in Stillwater, Minn. Neither
approach is better than the other, he insisted.
"Wrapping services around technology because it needs services
to function, that's not a good thing," he said. "But wrapping
services around technology because it can offload work so that the
business can concentrate on its core function, that's a good
thing."
Let us know what you think about the story; email:
Shamus McGillicuddy,
News Writer