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May 2004
ILM: A strategic opportunity for storage vendors?
The 451 Group believes that 2004 will be a key development year for enterprise IT products and services built around information lifecycle management (ILM) technologies.
ILM technologies enable organizations to dynamically and seamlessly manage corporate information according to its changing value over time. For users, the motivations are economic (i.e., more efficient storage utilization), operational (i.e., automated management of increasingly distributed system resources) and legal (i.e., required by state and federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and others). Although arguably vendor-driven and perhaps somewhat 'utopian' in vision, ILM is a becoming a very attractive idea for CIOs and, subsequently, an area of emerging marketplace activity for vendors in the enterprise storage and software arenas.
The 451 Group believes that ILM is currently in the early hype stage. Although attention being paid to ILM has raised its profile within all levels of enterprise IT organizations, The 451 Group's research shows that there are no cross-enterprise ILM offerings available today.
This 451 Special Report focuses on the competitive opportunities and challenges for vendor companies within ILM – and predominantly for those companies in the storage sector. The 451 Group believes this is both where end users are applying pressure on vendors for products and services, and where most of the current competitive activity is focused. In this report, 451 analysts have identified the most compelling market segments and, subsequently, the most compelling vendors within those segments. The resultant synthesis defines growth areas for future product deployment and vendor competition, as well as the subsequent positioning, investment opportunities and marketplace M&A that will ensue.
This report is more than 230 pages in length and was written by Simon Robinson, sector head for storage & systems; John Abbott, chief analyst; and Steve Wallage, director of research.
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