Is the IT industry and specifically, storage and networking segments currently lacking from innovation? The answer to that question exists in part due to what your definition or view of innovation is and how it is measured.
By some definitions, innovation is defined by how many startups exists as was the case in the late 90s and early 2000s when there was a large number of startup companies involving Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, SRM, CDP, Backup, Compliance and Archiving among others.
Several bloggers have recently made posts about what is or what is not innovative as well as how previous innovate hype may have led to showing up on the not so hot or where are they now lists. Some examples can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here among others.
3Leaf, 4blox, Astaro, Attrato, Autovirt, Axxana, Candera, Caringo, Cassatt, Cleaversafe, Code42, Continuity, Cyberark, Digitalocular, Drobo, Fisec, FusionIO, Fusionio, Greenbytes, Iosafe, Monospehere, Moonwalk, Neptuney, Netrion, Nextio, Nirvanix, Numonyx, Ocarina, Open-e, Parrascale, Piviot3, Pliant, Racemi, ScaleMP, Seanodes, Stormagic, Storwize, Tarmin, Violin, Woven, XIV and Xsigo among others constantly show up in my inbox making announcements or preparing to launch, some have been around longer than others.
There are also several startups that are still either in stealth mode or preferring to keep a low profile for now. How does this compare to what we saw in the storage and networking industry during the late 90s and early 2000s, certainly not the same number or amount of money being spent on marketing startups, however there are still startup companies to fill the void left from M&A as well as to address new opportunities including in the converged storage, networking and server sectors as well as virtualization.
Look, here’s my point, vendors have been innovating and even more impotently, executing and delivering on prior hype and innovation with scalable and stable solutions. What of established companies such as Amazon and their S3 cloud solution are innovative or EMC with their cloud optimized storage aka Atmos are innovative? How about Sun with their open source based solutions are those innovate for the industry or for the vendor?
As for technologies and techniques, which are innovative or evolutionary, that depends, however some candidates include among others:
What’s your take, is there still innovation taking place in storage and networking, or, is it all just hype and execution delivering on prior hype?
Ok, nuff said.
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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Great post Greg -
Here's an exercise - in 2003 I managed STK's research labs. Here were some of our research probe and IP activities:
- Flash/SSD
- Utility Storage (which we can argue is *close* to SaaS, then Cloud Storage)
- Grid Storage (Our research was *similar* to what EMC has done with Atmos)
- Dedup (We called it Global Compression at the time)
- Clustered Storage
We obviously weren't the only ones looking at this stuff. Open storage at Sun is pretty new, but Linux and Linux nodes broke the market in for this innovation. We didn't research networking technologies too much, nor did we research drive interfaces - but that wasn't close to our core biz at the time.
I'd say 9 out of 10 "innovations" I hear about are ones I've heard before. The rest are a variation of an earlier idea. However, there is a big gap between ideas and execution, so those who bring these innovations to market are to be commended.
Thanks Taylor for the comments and perspectives.
An all to often related theme heard is revolutionary in addition to innovate, yet, many of what gets positioned as revolutionary is really evolutionary, likewise what can be innovative is really innovative once it gets deployed via execution.
That begs some questions:
Perhaps what we need more of in addition to execution which I believe is one of the main themes of the past few years and moving into next year is also some innovative marketing. That is, innovative beyond the worn out "first and only", "Industry unique", "Revolutionary", "Innovative" and the various other combinations.
Perhaps that?s a bit to cynical, however it also presents opportunities for some cleaver marketers to show us some innovation such as taking products or technologies that are normally not fun or boring to talk about and show us innovative ways to use them.
For example, how about some innovation around tape media, device and accessories marketing? How about some innovation around Fibre Channel or storage system? How about some innovation around archiving for life beyond compliance, you know the role archiving had before the compliance crazed. Maybe Sun could innovate themselves out of their current dire straights by doing some innovative sales and marketing around some of their legacy STK and other storage products while trying to convert the world to lower margin, lower revenue open source based solutions?
Cheers - gs