Twin Strata

What makes today’s “storage as a service” providers more likely to succeed than those of 10 years ago? On the surface, much can be said about technology improvements and nearly ubiquitous bandwidth availability as catalysts for customer acceptance and adoption.  Layer on top of that proven economies of scale and a pay-as-you-go model from Amazon and other providers and you no longer have a promise but rather a very real and very attractive cost model for many businesses.

Why ASPs had it tough

While technology and cost savings are making a difference, an often neglected differentiator between the xSPs of yesteryear and the XaaS ecosystems of today may be the actual presence of an ecosystem versus a monolithic provider. Consider that an application service provider (ASP) who decides to bring a end-to-end solution to market needs

• Economic and scalable infrastructure
• Application expertise, and
• A way to bridge the solution to the enterprise

A rather ambitious undertaking, I’d say. Tradeoffs in any of the above areas may reduce the business value or compromise the end solution.

Let’s look at a more concrete example relevant to storage. Say I have developed unique technology that reduces my data sizes by up to an order of magnitude. If I wanted to roll this technology into a data backup solution following the ASP model, I would (1) build the backup application software, (2) build the data reduction technology that connects to storage and (3) build out the storage infrastructure to house the data. Rather than attempting to tackle all three steps myself, I could turn to the existing ecosystem to leverage others’ core strengths and expertise in order to optimize the overall solution.

Enter the ecosystem

Working within the ecosystem, my technology could leverage best of breed cloud storage, replete with availability and cost efficiency options from a number of mature storage providers. But what if I could also leverage existing backup software so that IT administrators weren’t forced to rip and replace, not to mention learn new solutions?  And what if I could deliver my solution as software that bridges a customer’s existing technology to their choice of multiple best-of-breed cloud providers? For starters, I benefit from a significantly faster time to market, the ability to retain focus on enhancing my core value proposition, and access to a larger addressable market due to ease of integration. Users benefit from a broad array of choices, no lock-in, lower costs and user-friendly integration. Sure, competitors could join the ecosystem but that only further benefits end-users by enabling additional choices.

Sound interesting? You bet.  The intelligent storage cloud is all about combining the best of the best, whether it is the expertise of service providers, solution providers or enablement providers.  The power of an ecosystem is that it is much greater than than the sum of its parts.

At the end of the day, an ecosystem means more choices, cost-savings and better technology for the end-user.

What do you think is the key differentiator between the storage clouds of today and the early storage service providers?