computerwoche.de

Archiv

Who are the smartest guys in the room?

21.04.2006
Lately, as I make my early morning coffee run, I've been tuning into the running Enron/Jeff Skillings reportage. I find it in some ways tragic, and in other ways evocative. And I'm constantly reminded of conversations I had with a handful of Enron people years ago when the "smartest guys in the room" embarked on their storage services venture.

I often wonder -- was Enron the storage service provider (SSP) just another dodge? Or was there a kernel vision in there somewhere amongst the tangled financial threads?

I actually think that's a significant question.

Enron approached the SSP opportunity with characteristic aplomb. These guys liked to create commodities markets where none existed. They liked all things fungible. California's energy was a fungible commodity. And, believe it or not, so was storage. What Enron the SSP proposed to do was broker excess capacity among other SSPs, such as StorageNetworks, StorageWay and MSI. Your data that you thought was safely deposited with SSP X could be shuttled off to SSP Y -- depending on which SSP was willing to take your data at the going price. Perhaps only Jeff Skilling's Enron could have concocted this scheme. So when Google and Amazon.com come to the marketplace with their versions (http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,109564,00.html) of the SSP, there is a tendency to pass them off as two Internet behemoths just looking for another way to make a buck. Pass them off at your peril if you are a storage vendor. If you think Amazon is looking to sell storage to college students needing a place to park their CD collections (legitimately acquired and otherwise), then reread the Simple Storage Services (S3) press release (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=830815&highlight=) of a few weeks ago.

The company wants serious IT users, and it's getting them to sign up, upload, download, hit and share terabytes. Think of S3 as a way for Amazon to expand its already successful application-hosting services, except in this case, the IT user provides the application while Amazon provides the storage. And then there's Google. Did it ever strike you that the collection of processes we know as business intelligence have a lot in common with "Googling?" There's a new collection of smart guys in the room.

John Webster is senior analyst and founder of research firm Data Mobility Group LLC. He is also the author of numerous articles and white papers on a wide range of topics and is the co-author of the book Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence (IBM Press, 2005). Webster can be reached atjwebster@datamobilitygroup.com (mailto:jwebster@datamobilitygroup.com).