March (Trade Show) Madness

If you are a basketball fan, March is the best time of year as your days and nights are filled with buzzer beaters, nail biters and tremendous competition. If you are in high-tech (IT professional or vendor), March starts a different kind of madness; trade show season. For the next 8 weeks, seemingly every industry has a trade show in cities like Las Vegas, Palm Springs, San Deigo, and Chicago Your days and nights are filled with planes, booths, sales gimmicks, executive posturing and many new product announcements. Hoops and high-tech, could it get any more fun?

I am going to stick with parallelisms in this blog, and if you do not follow March Madness, I apologize in advance. When it comes to storage tradeshows, there are always some cool things that vendors announce. Here are my picks for the Vendor Final Four and reasons why. If you get a chance to check them out a show, I believe these will be worth your time.

Information Classification Bracket: FAST Search and Transfer

FAST has been helping enterprises index and classify information and is starting to develop a strong following when it comes to adding value in the "traditional" storage market. With organizations archiving Petabtyes of data every year, there needs to be a way to find it easily. If you have deployed an e-mail archiving solution, there is a 90% chance that the search function of the product is enabled by FAST, as many of the e-mail archiving software vendors partner with FAST.

Storage Systems Bracket: LSI Logic

Its official, the Engenio IPO is off, and it was a great move. Also, the new leadership team at LSI Logic (primarily composed of former Intel executives and Engenio all-stars) is reorganizing the company to leverage its expertise in the consumer and storage markets. If you are using an IBM FASTt or DS4000, a personal video recorder, or an Emulex HBA, you are an LSI Logic customer. LSI is the BASF of storage. They do not make the IBM mid range products; they make the IBM mid range products better. (You can insert many products into that statement, "IBM midrange" is just an example).

Data Management Bracket: Softek

As customers look to leverage tiers of storage, they are going to need sophisticated data mobility and migration stools to manage their information. Softek is quickly becoming an expert in this market, as other software vendors are focusing on more sexy data protection features.

Storage Pure-Play Bracket: NetworkAppliance

NetApp is about to conclude another phenomenal year where it grew revenues 25+ percent. The company has invested many of those hard-earned dollars in integrating acquisitions and developing new products. The fruits of Spinnaker, Alacritus and Decru are being harvested and new offerings should be a-plenty. Its time for NetApp's customers to look under the NetApp software tree, especially with data security and protection still causing heartburn.

If you are looking for Cinderella stories, there a couple. Brocade (Tapestry products), Attenex (e-discovery software), Zantaz (e-discovery, e-mail archiving and litigation support software).

I am looking forward to both March Madness events; the hoops games and the trade shows. Hopefully, your bracket picks are as good as mine (only if we are in different office pools) and I will see you at the trade shows.