Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

STORAGE VENDORS TARGETING SMBs AS AREA FOR GROWTH

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Storage Deployment and Budgets for Cost-Conscious SMBs to their offering.

In the past year, vendors from across the storage industry have targeted the small and medium business (SMB) segment as an area for considerable growth. Most SMBs rely on basic internal server disks or direct-attached storage for storing data. The needs of these businesses to store and manage the ever-increasing amount of data with limited resources are similar to large businesses. Nonetheless, vendors have gone through several iterations of product development, packaging and pricing to enter this market segment.

Bringing successful products to this market segment is a continuous challenge. Storage expertise, budget and capacity requirements are considerably smaller than typical storage vendors have dealt with in the enterprise space. Recent surveys show that:

• Approximately 46 percent of SMBs have three or fewer dedicated IT employees.

• Nearly 60 percent of SMBs have a total storage budget of $50,000 or less.

• Roughly 69 percent of SMBs are willing to spend less than $10,000 on storage systems and storage networking equipment to deploy 1TB of external storage.

• Nearly 38 percent of SMBs have less than 1TB of storage in their IT environment.

To succeed in the SMB segment, vendors must take the following steps:

• Provide product interoperability with existing components in the SMB infrastructure.

• Mask the complexity of all the necessary storage-related components.

• Reduce the costs and bundle the components together to simplify the procurement process, but maintain enough basic functionality so that these businesses can still share, manage and protect their data.

• Develop a strong, SMB channel strategy.

Competition grows fierce as storage system incumbents, such as EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and Network Appliance compete with each other, and also due to second-tier storage companies, emerging companies and the increasing capacities of internal server disks.