Storage Area Networks
What's in Store?
Computer storage, while it may be essential to business, raises about as much enthusiasm as a bout of spring cleaning. Yet storage accounts for 70 percent of IT capital budgets, according to Enterprise Storage Group, a U.S. consultancy. As businesses gather more data — some estimates show the amount doubling every nine months — that level of spending just can't be ignored. Nor can the fact most companies are woefully inefficient at using the storage they've paid for. Excess capacity abounds, but appropriate management tools do not. Often data is duplicated on multiple drives yet remains inaccessible to employees who need it.
Experts say that the only way to contain costs and manage all that data efficiently is to move the data away from the applications that create or use it, into a central repository accessible by many. Two approaches hold sway. Storage-area networks (SANs) do for data retrieval what conventional computer networks do for processing; they link disparate servers into a unified, sharable resource. Network-architected storage (NAS) deploys a specialized "appliance" that maintains a single file system across a wide range of computers. There are important differences between the two systems, but experts believe the two are complementary and will likely converge.
As storage moves to a networked environment, however, the task of managing it becomes more complex. Storage makers have been slow to drop their proprietary standards in the name of interoperability with different hardware and software systems. EMC, the market leader, has moved to fix that with a suite of software offerings called AutoIS. "The growing complexity of our customers' environments has imposed an artificial ceiling on their growth potential," admits James Hanley, EMC's managing director for greater China and the Philippines. "The goal of AutoIS is to remove this barrier over time by helping customers reduce complexity, lower management costs, and automate many labor-intensive and inefficient processes."
EMC now spends 75 percent of its R&D budget on software — one sign that storage is no longer simply about disk drives. Moreover, IBM has shown renewed interest in the market with its Shark technology, and Sun Microsystems has bolstered its storage software offerings through its acquisition of HighGround Systems. Taken together, those developments suggest that storage has become not only a critical strategic issue, but maybe even interesting.
Product Lifecycle Management
To Market, to Market
Companies that show capacity to deliver the right products to market faster than the competition command a premium on capital markets. Yet globalization and the Internet make devising a product strategy more complex than ever. Indeed, as the prolific inventor Thomas Edison once said, genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.
Recently, however, a new class of application has emerged to address the increasing pressure facing companies that need to identify, develop, and market winning products in Internet time. So-called product lifecycle management (PLM) systems marry advances in supply chain management with traditional R&D and marketing concerns. Offered by companies such as U.S.-based MS2 and BetaSphere, the software aims to lower the cost of developing new products, bring them to market faster, cut the cost of managing suppliers, and reduce project overruns, workarounds, and failures. One way it does this is by helping companies determine what customers want from a product, how much they're willing to pay, and what they'd change.
PLM products could have a significant impact on a company's balance sheet. According to Boston-based AMR Research, better PLM could create $106 billion in new operating margins for U.S. manufacturers alone. Adds Jack Maynard, research director for Boston-based Aberdeen Group: "Design review times can be decreased 50 to 80 percent, and errors can be reduced an order of magnitude."
May Tsoi, product marketing manager for U.S.-based Palm, is sold on the concept. She used BetaSphere's Web-based software to profile and recruit candidates for its Palm VII beta program. "Any beta program can 'get feedback,' " says Tsoi. "Our real challenge is to target exactly the right demographic for our market, so we have high confidence in the type of feedback we receive. The right participants absolutely determine the success of the process."
Tsoi says that by the time a product is ready for beta testing, usually it is too late to make drastic design changes. Feedback from beta testers helped Palm prioritize and determine which features would make the cut in the final product. "We were able to focus on the quality of the product instead of the details of managing customer feedback," Tsoi says.
Management Planning & Control
Zoom with a View
"The economic downturn and 9/11 are reminders to take budgeting seriously. Things come out of left field," says David Allcock, vice president of Comshare, maker of management planning and control (MPC) software. London-based Allcock, who has responsibility for Comshare's Asian markets, adds: "Finance people want to evolve their roles from scorekeeper to business partner. CFOs want their finance teams to be freed of data processing duties so they can concentrate on value-adding work." As such, they're looking beyond basic budgeting to financial reporting, information delivery, analysis, performance management, and planning — and they want something that combines them all together.
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