Grab Your Partner

5:50 PM -- ORLANDO -- Storage Networking World -- It's a fact of life that partnerships drive the storage networking industry. Lately, though, the array (no pun intended) of pairings and multiple menages is getting tough to follow.

Xiotech and Copan... Xyratex and Intel... 3PAR and Onstor and AppIQ... Intransa and Rasilient... It can be a downright resource drain to sift who's selling what to whom and in which market, who the target buyers are, and even what the products with partnership stamps actually do. Forget questions of support. To make matters worse, suppliers are secretive on one hand, pushy on the other when it comes to publicizing partnerships.

Is it really important? We know vendors care about who's named with whom, and it's fun for journalists to chase the latest deal. But delivering the goods in coherent fashion to end users is the test of any supplier grouping. Until that happens, a partnership is little more than another grab at publicity.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch