Martin: Well, let me tell you the conversation I usually have with the CIO. And I've done this now with something like 300 CIOs... Ninety percent of the information you have sitting on disk is never used. This usually gets their attention. Yet you're growing your disk environment, 15, 20, 30 percent a year, and in terms of storage capacity, probably 70 percent a year. And so, why do you have all that stuff sitting on disk which is the most expensive medium you have when you have the ability to move it? We have the opportunity to take that excess, those duplicate sets of information and the infrequently used information, and move them from disk to tape, or to ATA drives, depending on their needs...
[Information lifecycle management] is really starting to gain traction for a couple of reasons. One: In the financial areas, now it's a legal requirement that you keep all email for three years... So it has the characteristics of high storage requirements, but low retrieval requirements. Clearly that plays into our strength. Another example is all the HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] regulations that are requiring information storage for a long, long time... If people just start rolling that all into primary disk, their budgets are going to go through the roof.
NEXT: 'An Opportunity for Leadership Change'
Byte and Switch: Do you think you have any chance of competing against EMC or IBM in the disk array market?
Martin: Almost every decade there are new leaders in the disk business. If you go way, way back when you were probably in diapers, or maybe not even born yet, IBM dominated the disk business in the '70s. [Ed. note: By the mid-'70s, at least, we were already potty-trained.] Then in the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s, Control Data came along. Control Data... sold more disk drives in IBM environments than IBM did. Then there were a few other players... They're all gone. EMC came in with RAID technology in the mid-'90s and they built, obviously, a terrific company. But every time there's a technology change, I think there's an opportunity for leadership to change.
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