"Storage Is Becoming The IT Strategy Driver".

Interview with Steve Ladwig, President of Imation's Data Storage and Information Management

MARK: The question, Steve, is this: of all the things that have happened in storage in your experience, could you point out to me the two or three developments, technologically?

STEVE: The biggest one has to be that storage has emerged as a strategic element in the information technology industry and in customer's information technology decisions.

MARK: And that's been long in coming.

STEVE: Yes and you can make the argument that it is becoming the strategy driver. How do I get the zeros and ones on something? How do I deal with it? How do I deal with it cost effectively? That's starting to drive a lot. I'm seeing it driving a tremendous amount of architectural decisions. You can't run around and just hang storage off a mainframe in an intelligent subsystem anymore. Why? The volume has got so high you can't afford that kind of an architecture, but now it's cheaper to go with a cheap plentiful storage model that burns more processors and burns more network.

MARK: Are people beginning to do more capacity planning?

STEVE: I think they are. Customers are asking us to help them dial in to some accurate storage requirement projections. We're the same way here in Imation. When you see your storage, when you start to go into e-commerce, and you start to go into customer relationship management, and you're doing that on the back of doing that ERP implementation and you've still got your old mainline back office, HR, payroll, and you're trying to do integrated product supply chain apps, the amount of storage that's required to optimize your business against those apps is still growing--85% to 100% a year.

MARK: You have a lot of applications that weren't considered before--like decision support, OLAP, those kinds of things.

STEVE: Bingo. When they talk about data storage, they start to blend into information management very quickly now because you see the retailers that we've talked to want to keep as much data available--online, nearline, or offline--that they can analyze. We used to see that in the geophysical industries, but you're seeing that now in retail. You're seeing that in financial services. You're seeing it in manufacturing where they want to optimize a supply chain and where they want to study things. So, data storage is now strategic. You've got to talk about this whole information management trend; you're seeing people starting to talk about data storage and information management and that trend leads me to the third one, which is solutions and services. Why have we started a professional services group? Now that storage is strategic, there's tons of it out there and customers want to manage it as information not data. There aren't enough humans in the planet that are really skilled in doing this. So, we've kicked off a big professional services group. I can tell you, Mark, I think that's a result in one of the big trends about storage I was just reading about last night. Was it Fortune, I think? Earlier this year, they published their "One Of The Ten Top Megatrends" article. The first one of their list was storage, storage, and storage. Do you know that?

MARK: No, I didn't, but I sure believe it.

STEVE: Yeah, I was just reading that and what we're saying is kind of, we're just echoing the same thing. So, we're looking at professional services, number one, to help people determine what the architecture and implementation that is most cost-effective for your business because the rules are not the same as they were two years ago.

MARK: So, this is a serious storage management consulting function.

STEVE: Absolutely. We think that market opportunities could grow at least 50% a year.