There should be a correlation between the exponential growth in the volume of data, which necessarily has to be stored – for operational reasons or for regulatory compliance – and the results of companies that sell storage systems. But these results are lukewarm and in some cases negative. With nuances, these companies allude to a pause in the investments of their clients. Now, why take a break if there are no economic reasons for an investment slowdown and if, sooner rather than later, they will find themselves in the position of expanding or renewing their installed storage base?
José Manuel Petisco, general director of NetApp Iberia, has a plausible explanation: “The pandemic led us to a very high level of investment in digitization to respond to unforeseen needs, but once these circumstances passed, companies have entered a phase in the one that seeks to optimize investments to return to a more controlled environment. This is what influences flat or moderate growth, especially if we compare them with what we have experienced”.
The phenomenon affects the sector globally, but varies by product category and technology. And enthusiasm for cloud migration dies down, with the same explanation, it seems. The figures confirm Petisco’s opinion: while NetApp closed its fiscal year in April with 0.6% growth in revenue, the local subsidiary registered a 23% market share in its flagship category, flash technology systems, called to replace the rotational discs. “Almost eight points of difference with the second in the table”, he points out.
The experienced manager describes the beginning of a phase that he calls evolutionary, “in which the client tries to understand what he has, where he has it – which is not always clear when teams of different ages coexist – and what performance he obtains; They can’t give up that staple item that is data, but they can compare the costs of options on the market. Our role is to help them in that search.”
The storied NetApp was among the first specialty companies to leapfrog its technology and storage systems to be adopted by cloud service providers. In fact, it has agreements and alliances with all the major ones. But this migration from storage to cloud infrastructures requires reflection and, for this reason, the company – like some competitors – has once again reinforced its catalog with products for corporate data centers. He has presented two new families of products, both with flash technology, which he bundles with software solutions to comply with the optimization that is part of his preaching.
Going forward, a facility refresh cycle is looming, and NetApp believes it is prepared for that trend: “The faster demand for flash increases, the better for us, thanks to leadership in that market, but the pace of replacement is not at our hands but in that of the clients”.
Data growth is not vegetative, but exponential. It has been calculated that more data is generated in a single day than was generated in a whole year at the beginning of the century: roughly, a multiple of 365. And it goes further, with the proliferation of applications, which are now adds the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), whose learning starts from the intake of the more data, the better. “We are never going to be an AI company – points out Petisco – but we are necessary protagonists of the infrastructure in which the data from which the AI ??feeds are stored, cleaned and managed”.
