Storage Networking World 2005

With the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) now on board as co-hosts, this year's Storage Networking World (formerly known as Storage World) promises to be the biggest and best ever, with a real international flavour to the proceedings. We talked to some of the leading exhibitors to get their thoughts on what is set to be one of the biggest IT events in Australia this year

IDM-What are the main reasons for your participation in SNW?

Sony-Vincent Bautista, product manager, business solutions division SNW is Australia's premier storage industry event for the year. SNW is a great opportunity to showcase Sony's background and strength in storage. Attending SNW also exposes Sony's storage products to a wide range of storage users from entry level to enterprise.

IBM-Francois Vazille, TotalStorage business unit executive, ANZ

IBM TotalStorage intends to show its leadership and openness with its complete range of storage solutions for infrastructure Simplification, Business Continuity and Information Lifecycle Management. IBM's technologies include virtual disk and tape, enterprise to low end disk and tape, SAN technologies and comprehensive storage management software.

HP-Andrew Manners, director, network storage

The storage market evolves very quickly. In the past two months we have released over twenty new products and solutions. SNW gives us an excellent opportunity to showcase these and allow customers to benchmark HP's value versus other vendors.

Bakbone-Victor Koshka, regional manager, South Pacific

As a storage vendor, we feel that this is a very pertinent and specific show to bring vendors and end-users together that are interested specifically in our line of business - data protection.

Sun-Dan Kieran, storage product business manager, ANZ

It's a great opportunity for Sun to display and demonstrate our storage portfolio as well as highlight our ecosystem of storage partners and applications to a highly targeted audience of users, influencers and decision makers.

American Power Conversion (APC)-Leanne Cunnold, general manager, South Asia

Storage as an industry has gained significant momentum and interest over the years. This is primarily driven by the sharp increase in the amount of data in both the personal and corporate domains.

Personal computing has seen a rise in data intensive applications like pictures, music and email files with attachments and increased email box sizes. Corporate data storage, however, is increasing because of changes in procedures like e-governance, Sarbanes Oxley compliance and data mining.

Additionally, access to data is often quite critical. This level of availability hinges on the quality of the network and the network-critical physical layer foundation that supports it.

APC's participation in this event is to showcase our capabilities and strengths to support storage applications. We'll do this via our new, highly available and managed data centre and server room architecture that supports a pay-as-you-grow model. CIOs and IT managers have shown keen interest in this new approach to increase availability and uptime.

StorageTek-Joan Tunstall, marketing manager, ANZ

We have recently joined the Australian chapter of SNIA and StorageTek is represented on the board. As such, I felt it would be good to support this local SNIA initiative and do our part in helping build SNW into a great event.

IDM-What do you feel SNIA's participation as co-event organisers will bring to the event that may not have been in evidence in previous years?

Sony - Having SNIA's support of the event raises the credibility of the event. SNIA is well respected in the industry, drawing in key storage decision makers and IT partners.

IBM-IBM expects SNIA's involvement to bring a more relevant agenda and learning experience for attendees. The sessions on the agenda have been selected by the Board members of SNIA itself, not by an event partner, and so we would expect the IT community to see strong content.

HP-SNIA will bring vendor experience and credibility. SNIA has been involved with SNW in the US for several years and that experience along with significant independent conference content will be valued by attendees.

Bakbone-It will bring more credibility to this event.

Sun-I suspect SNIA will help Terrapinn finely tune this event, to ensure that participants, speakers, and associated workshops address the key data management issues and concerns facing organisations today. This will provide visitors to SNW with the necessary balance of industry and technology knowledge to make the right decisions in this complex landscape.

APC-SNIA has an impressive membership base that we will be able to showcase our products to. This greatly increases the appeal of the conference for us.

StorageTek-SNIA's participation as a co-event organiser should encourage more serious storage players to attend the conference. In the past we have felt let down by the overall quality of the audience and there were too many vendors simply talking to other vendors.

IDM-How important do you regard participation in this event in terms of your overall activities throughout the year?

Sony-With a few key products and technologies released this year, participation at the event exposes these further to the storage market. Participation in the event increases mindshare to these products.

IBM-IBM's participation in SNW is an important part of a comprehensive strategy to showcase IBM TotalStorage's and our business partners' leading storage solutions for large and small organisations across Australia and IBM's vendor neutral approach.

HP-This is the only third party operated event in which we participate in. From an investment perspective it is critically important for us.

Bakbone-We only participate in 1-2 industry shows per year and SNW is a very focused event that suits our product offering.

Sun-In terms of Sun's annual storage go-to-market program, this is one of our key planks to increase the awareness and visibility of our diverse spectrum of data management capabilities.

APC-The importance of this event can be measured by the opportunities available to APC to interact with key decision makers and gain feedback to our architecture.

Additionally, we will be showcasing aspects of our proof of concept centre that will make it easy for IT decision makers to touch, feel and see our solutions. They will also have access to white papers and interaction with our datacentre consultants for answers to the challenges they face in with high availability for their storage solutions.

StorageTek-Conferences and trade shows are not a major part of our overall marketing activities. I have made an exception in this case because of our partnership with SNIA and the event is clearly associated with our core business, so it's well targeted for us.

IDM-What will be the main message you will be looking to get across to delegates at the event from your stand?

Sony-The stand will touch on reinforcing Sony's strong background in storage. With new corporate regulations being put in place in the industry, Sony will showcase key storage products that will work in line with these regulations.

IBM-IBM and its business partners can provide organisations with solutions which not only address increasing storage demands, but maximise their storage investment by delivering the right mix of products for nearly every aspect of business efficiency and continuance. IBM TotalStorage can help organisations store, safeguard, retrieve and share data, while helping them to extend their availability to be as open, safe, flexible and fast as their business requires.

HP-The primary theme will be "Putting Information to Work". This has different relevance to different customer segments. For small to medium sized companies, this is about simplified storage; to an enterprise this is about leveraging information for competitive advantage. Information is the most significant asset any company has - we want to help companies harness this.

Bakbone-We will be showing our enterprise class data protection software and encourage delegates to look at us an alternative to others in the market where lower TCO is desired along with a scalable and heterogeneous product support. Our breath of support in UNIX, Windows, Linux, Mac and Netware is unmatched in backup and restore and new supportive and easy to use technology like D2D2T is a standard offering in our product.

Sun-As a systems company, Sun Microsystems will focus on bringing a complete systems perspective of storage and data management to SNW. We will endeavour to show breadth and depth of our offerings - products, solutions and services.

APC-Availability of storage solutions is dependent on the network-critical physical layer that forms its foundation. APC has industry leading solutions that increase the availability of datacentres, storage and remote site networks in a cost-effective, managed environment.

StorageTek-StorageTek will demonstrate new solutions that drive storage productivity; make data protection simple and reliable; and enable scalable and flexible archiving. Our message is that we are the industry leader in these storage competencies. According to an April 2005 study "The Growing Importance of Archive" by Freeman Reports, StorageTek continues to dominate the storage industry as the leading provider of long-term information archiving solutions. More than 36 percent of all archived data in the world is stored on StorageTek solutions, with more than twice the market share of the nearest competitor.

We want to let people know of this pedigree and to demonstrate how we are building on it today with innovative solutions to take them forward for decades to come. We'd also like people to know the StorageTek is committed to training the industry in storage related disciplines. StorageTek has initiated the Diploma of Data Storage Engineering in cooperation with North Sydney TAFE and we have our first students enrolled in the course.

IDM-How important do you think it is for SNW to do well this year, given the increased competition from rival events, and what will it take for you to consider SNW a success for your company?

Sony-SNW will be one of Sony's biggest storage events for the year. Mindshare of Sony's products is a major goal and success of participating in SNW will be measured by the amount of questions at the stand and successful leads thereafter.

IBM-SNW has replaced Storage World as a generic storage event-i.e. not vendor specific, nor driven by independent consultants and industry analysts. IBM expects to have many useful interactions at the event with organisations and their IT teams.

HP-Any event is a year to year proposition. If it can't generate the relevance with the attendees or credibility with the vendors it ceases to exist. So for SNW every year is critical. HP will measure the success of the event by the number and importance of the attendees at both the conference and trade floor.

Bakbone-Very important, as maintaining relevance in today's market will be the final test for events like this.

Sun-I am confident this will be a successful event and vehicle for Sun and all the other participating organisations to get our messages directly to a highly targeted audience.

More importantly, I also believe that visitors to SNW will be the real benefactors of the show, as they will subsequently be armed with the latest industry and technology news and information to assist them and their organisations to navigate their way through the maze of data management options in the market place today.

StorageTek-I would like SNW to do well. I understand that, like us, other vendors have decided to return to the event this year. This means it has the potential to be a very good show. I use the traditional measures for success - participation by a well targeted audience and the quality of leads for StorageTek and our channel partners.

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