Alternative Universe

8:00 AM -- Have you tried buying a cellphone without a camera lately?

If you're like millions of consumers, you may have been pushed into buying a camera phone despite your puzzlement. But the campaign hasn't worked. According to a report from the NPD Group, cellphone operators are extremely disappointed that people are just taking pictures and then using their phones as glorified photo albums instead of forwarding the pics to friends, families, ex-bosses, and the like. Apparently, the average consumer doesn't perceive an image in the same way as a text message, and that means less revenue per subscriber.

The fact that any customer, whether the product is a cellular phone or networked storage, just wants data to be available when they need it should come as no surprise. Consumer or corporate users all have to choose between nice to have versus need to have. IT vendors need to pay attention.

Four-gig Fibre Channel vendors, are you listening? The same goes for you purveyors of information lifecycle management (ILM) suites and other storage resource management (SRM) schemes. And let's toss in the mostly very pricey CDP packages while we're at it.

It's dangerous to get too enamored of one's many marvelous wares. The risk is that you wind up in an alternative universe -- one not peopled by your customers.It's time to drift earthward -- especially after the crummy quarterly financials turned in by most of the big names in storage. (See Storage Financials Take a Dip.) While it's not clear how much a jaded storage buyer is to blame for those numbers, the market surely isn't being spurred on by random launches of ILM, SRM, and CDP.

On some level, the venture capital companies are tuning into the disconnect, too. By Byte and Switch's count, 11 startups got $171 million in the first four months of 2006, compared to 16 startups getting $235.5 million for the same period a year ago. (See Storage '06 Funding Down.) The continued acquisitiveness of the big storage vendors only explains part of that, in my opinion.

Cellular carriers aren't the first to get it wrong, and they won't be the last. Let's just hope storage vendors and those in other IT sectors don't presume too large a willingness to buy.

Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch