My Healthcare Valentine

5:30 PM --- Storage's new best friend is healthcare. If you're not involved in selling your wares to hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers, or labs you're as out of place as a red-carpet starlet without a designer dress.

Healthcare is sexy for a number of reasons. It's a market with tons of mandated fixed-content storage -- for which demand seems endless. There's plenty of money, and partnership possibilities are legion. Best of all, the customers are big, important, and convincing. After all, if you can make it where lives are at stake, you should be a shoo-in where only money's at risk, right? (See Healthcare Prescribes Storage.)

Check out today's announcements alone, rife with healthcare name-dropping: (See Permeo Helps UCH , CA, Carefx Team, JCMG Selects NSI, Geisinger Selects Sun, Clarian Standardizes on Dell, Dell Adds Healthcare IT Program, and BridgeHead, Amicas Partner.) Note that many of the preceding are simply case studies, not even actual product, service, or partnership announcements.

There are trends in the deluge. Today two data classification startups, Abrevity and StoredIQ, weighed in with healthcare bids: Abrevity, in a weak attempt to proclaim itself out of stealth mode two years after the fact, has released BioData Manager to sort lab files. (See Abrevity Adds File Solution and Abrevity.) And StoredIQ has teamed with a security vendor to offer healthcare content solutions. (See StoredIQ, CynergisTekTeam.)

Healthcare isn't the only vertical the classification startups are wooing. (See Peekaboo, StoredIQ!.) But it's certainly the one with the most cachet for these and other suppliers these days.Which leaves me wondering how well it's working. Is healthcare really holding up a huge part of the storage market? Or is it, like compliance was last year, a catch phrase for marketers that reflected only one aspect of reality?

Tell us what you think. Is healthcare the linchpin in storage networking? Would you be more inclined to buy from a storage supplier who had lots of hospital customers? Click on the message board below and let us know.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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