AppIQ
Start-up AppIQ is less than five years old and launched its first product two and a half years ago. Its storage resource management (SRM) software is already being OEMed by Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Silicon Graphics and Engenio Information Technologies. And in its last fiscal quarter it boosted its end-user customer count by almost a third, to 175 companies.
SRM is a wide ranging term that describes SAN management software alongside disk capacity analysis and monitoring software. It is the fastest growing sector of the storage software market, and is a key part of any vendors' storage management portfolio.
As the most successful of the crop of SRM start-ups that emerged four to five years ago, AppIQ says that it recognised that volume sales would only come via OEM deals, and so engineered not just its software but the company itself to suit OEM arrangements.
Cisco Systems
Forcing rivals into defensive mergers and acquisitions is a demonstration of significant sway, and that is exactly what Cisco has done since it entered the storage networking sector.
The biggest mergers that Cisco inspired were between CNT, Inrange Technologies and McData. First CNT bought Inrange in 2003, at a knock-down price because of the long-term threat to Inrange posed by Cisco. Then in 2004 CNT was bought by McData, which hopes to use CNT's services to improve its survival prospects.
Longterm, Cisco will certainly want to drive storage networking towards its protocol of choice, TCP/IP. There is also the possibility that it could expand into the supply of non-networking storage gear. Last year this appeared to have become a reality when Cisco struck a reselling deal covering EMC's NAS devices.
However, this deal has so far been very limited in volume, and is associated only with Cisco's WAFS networking technology.
CommVault Systems
Back-up management software is sticky technology. Customers are loath to switch out tried and trusted software and procedures in such a critical area as back-up, which is dominated by giants Veritas, IBM and Computer Associates.
But start-up CommVault has been growing its back-up sales hugely, and according to Gartner bumped up its revenue in this sector by around 50% in both 2003 and 2004, giving it greater market share than, for example, HP. This year the pace should pick up, as an OEM deal with Dell only came on-stream in the second quarter last year, and in April this year Hitachi announced its OEM deal with CommVault.
A spin-off from AT&T Bell Laboratories, CommVault has enjoyed its success because its software is far more than a simple backup product, and incorporates SRM, reporting, snapshotting and migration functions.
The explosion in data volumes and the emergence of disk-to-disk backup and tiered storage systems has created an opportunity for CommVault to develop back-up and management software written from scratch to suit this new environment, putting it in a very strong position against suppliers struggling to adapt and integrate legacy products.
Dell
The direct channel model is at the heart of Dell's business, but it has developed a large and indirect influence on the storage market via its relationship with EMC.
Dell has given EMC a superb route into the small to medium business sector, which is the fastest growing area of the storage market. While EMC's overall revenue last year grew by over 20%, revenue from the sale of its Clariion midrange disk array grew at twice that rate. Around a third of that revenue came via the deal which sees Dell manufacture some of EMC's low-end products, and badge a wider range of that gear as 'Dell/EMC' products.
The deal between EMC and Dell began in 2001, when there were questions about how long it would survive the threat of channel conflict.
Two years later the deal was extended until 2008. Dell's share of EMC's Clariion business has remained steady despite EMC's expansion of its reseller channel, from about 300 partners in 2002 to over 1000 now.
EMC
EMC has been steadily growing its share of almost every sector it competes in. Last year the company and its recent acquisitions saw revenue grow by 23%, in a like-for-like comparison.
That compares to just 5% growth in the overall external disk array market, and 12% in the overall storage software market, according to Gartner. This year, EMC expects to more than double what it anticipates will be overall storage market growth of about 8%.
EMC led the charge into information lifecycle management (although as Storage Technology is at pains to point out, it did not invent the term).
On more specific fronts, it has become the broadest backer of iSCSI, created the storage category of CAS that other vendors are now following it into, and is set to become what will be effectively the first tier-one vendor to bring smart switch-hosted applications to market.
Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi's subsidiary, Hitachi Data Systems, has more presence in the storage market than is obvious, because of its OEM deals with HP and Sun Microsystems, both of which rebrand HDS' flagship Lightning disk array, including the latest TagmaStore version of that device, which incorporates virtualisation software.
The competitiveness of the Lightning was one of the factors that drove a price war in the high end of the disk market around four years ago. That war made EMC decide to step up its software business, which in turn led to EMC's giant purchases of Documentum and Legato Software Solutions.
HDS has dropped very strong hints that it will move its virtualisation technology into the mid-market, probably sometime within the next 12 months. It has also made the same promise for the high-end NAS hardware that it launched in April.
IBM
IBM's biggest lead in the storage market has been in virtualisation, with its SAN Volume Controller.
Launched in 2003, SVC has racked up over 1000 production implementations, and has had far more success than any other tier-one storage vendor's virtualisation product.
Quite apart from the significant operational benefits it offers to customers, virtualisation has the potential to change the storage market considerably, by freeing customers from a technically-inspired vendor lock-in. Late last year Hitachi launched its first virtualisation product, and EMC will follow suit in the next quarter. These two companies might not have moved so quickly if it were not for IBM's success with SVC. Virtualisation will not be adopted overnight, but IBM has shortened the timetable.
Microsoft
Like Cisco Systems, Microsoft has been accused of being a match-maker in the storage sector, by those who believe the real synergy driving the merger of Veritas Software and Symantec is a shared fear of Microsoft's long-term business plans.
Even if that were true, Microsoft would still earn a place on this list.
Microsoft's push into storage over the last three to four years has seen it capture the majority of the low-end NAS market and enormously increase the prospects for iSCSI.
In April this year Microsoft began beta testing what is arguably its first standalone back-up product, which is called Data Protection Manager and can be seen as an early competitor in the emerging CDP market.
Veritas declared that it will not be supporting this particular Microsoft product because it competes with its own products. Later that month Veritas unveiled what it described as a direct response to Data Protection Manager.
Network Appliance
NetApp is one of the most admired companies in the storage industry, and is currently enjoying spectacular revenue growth. As CBR went to press, NetApp's guidance for its fiscal year ended April 2005 was for 35% revenue growth. Looking ahead to its fiscal year 2007, NetApp has talked of a 'stretch goal' of up to 40% growth.
But the company is still only a midsized player, and its influence has not been because of its size. Instead, NetApp has been pivotal in the evolution of network attached storage.
Demand for NAS is now growing so fast that in the last three months alone no lesser players than HP, IBM and HDS have very significantly stepped up their commitment to the technology. Without NetApp, this may never have happened.
NetApp may yet influence the industry in another way. Its very public support for iSCSI may see NAS act as a Trojan horse that will open the gates of the SAN market to iSCSI and IP-based storage.
Veritas Software
When Veritas completes its merger with Symantec it will become the fourth largest pure-play software supplier in the world, with one of the broadest stacks of storage, security and systems management in the IT industry.
With its growth fully played out in Veritas' core markets of back-up and volume management, three years ago the company began expanding into the adjacent market of server and application management with a handful of acquisitions, and promised to deliver utility computing systems that combine server and storage management.
Veritas insists that this utility plan will not be affected by the merger with Symantec, which will simply add security to the utility stack.
Given the investments it has made so far, it is not going to drop the plan, but it may very well find that the distraction of the merger will slow down the rate at which it will unleash utility computing products.
Best of the rest
It is not easy to pin down the top 10 most influential businesses in such a technically diverse and dynamic market as storage. There are several organisations hovering just outside the list, including start-ups Tacit, Xiotech, Permabit and Copan. Iron Mountain nearly earned a place on the list, as did Sun thanks to its announcement as CBR went to press that it is to buy StorageTek. Whether that buy boosts Sun's influence will play out after the deal closes.
Finally, nobody should forget the contribution that the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and senators Sarbanes and Oxley have made to the compliance and ILM market.
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