Microsoft – In Storage Market Monopoly?
Microsoft – In Storage Market Monopoly?
May 26, 2006: Signs have emerged that Microsoft is taking steps to super-strengthen its hold as a supplier of storage-related software.
Upon forming its Enterprise Storage Division four years ago, Microsoft had to overcome suspicion that it was about to encroach on yet another market. Microsoft then positioned itself as a company whose technologies enabled other vendors’ products to work better with Windows. Now, however, the strategy seems to have been revamped.
"The next step of our storage strategy is working on complete solutions - a single way to manage servers and storage and content-addressable storage," says Claude Lorenson, Microsoft’s group product manager of storage technologies. It has begun rolling out stand-alone storage products, such as its System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) software that backs up Windows file servers on a near-continuous basis. DPM competes with products from Revivio and Symantec.
The company is expected to expand DPM to support Exchange and SQL Server systems too. This will reportedly give it more of an entry into enterprise storage accounts. Claiming a huge market share for Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, Microsoft has been the strongest in the small and midsize business (SMB) sector. When DPM supports Exchange and SQL Server systems, it might be seen as a competitor in the enterprise storage applications market too.
Lorenson also adds that the company hopes that its iSCSI products, the Microsoft iSCSI initiator, the Microsoft/IBM iSCSI software-enabled remote boot and its WinTarget software, will lead it into enterprise storage markets that want to blend Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs.
Until now, Microsoft's storage offerings have largely been seen as complementary to others’ products. Now storage analysts say that the company could wipe out storage-management software for Windows vendors, so as to offer software that can be productised and take value out of current vendor offerings.
For now, Microsoft will not break out financial information for its storage division in its public reports. The first big announcement in this area will reportedly take place at the Storage Networking World conference in September 2006.
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