On the plus side, the majority of VCs say that in their talks with CIOs, the only part of the IT budget that is continuing to grow is for storage.
Companies are just coming to the realization that they may need a storage strategy, and this realization has been sped up by everyone hearing about disaster recovery and business continuity, says Paulina Rychenkova, a research analyst at Charles River Ventures.
This naturally leads people to take a second look at what they are doing with storage. So there is plenty of steam left in this market as a whole, she says.
According to several VCs we spoke with, investment hotspots include startups specializing in IT contingency and disaster recovery plans, particularly offsite resources. Products that support these trends, including redundant systems and applications for backing up copies of data, will be important next year.
Another potential hotspot might be storage management. For the most part, Rychenkova says, administrators still rely on individual product interfaces to manage network devices, storage devices, and the applications associated with them. These management tools that exist today are pretty rudimentary, virtualization being an example of a tool, not a solution to the overall management problem."
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