2009/06/09
TheRegister: Storage software following hardware downwards
by Chris Mellor
According to market intelligence firm IDC, you're not buying as much storage software as you did last year. Their report shows a 5.2 per cent decline in the first quarter of this year compared to a year ago.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker reports revenues of $2.8bn in the quarter, half that of the quarter's storage hardware revenues which were down 18.2 per cent over the year. Storage software sales slowed but not that steeply.
The report tracks eight functional storage markets: data protection and recovery, archiving (including email archiving), storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure, file system, and "other".
The slowdown was not even across this storage software spectrum. Laura DuBois, IDC's storage software research director, said: "Predominantly affected were the Device Management, Replication, and Infrastructure markets, all segments closely aligned with the storage systems themselves. File System and Management software were able to grow amidst the current economic climate."
With that in mind it is not that surprising, but still creditable, that Symantec actually grew its revenues while all the storage hardware suppliers and a hardware-free CA saw declining storage software sales.
The top supplier was EMC with a 21.8 per cent revenue share of $612m, down 14.5 per cent from $716m in the same quarter last year. Next was Symantec with its $531m, up 2.5 per cent. IBM was third with $342m, down 7 per cent. NetApp was fourth ($233m) with a 4.7 per cent decline and CA fifth with a 5 per cent decline to $120m.
HP suffered the severest contraction in sales, being in sixth position with a 21.5 per cent fall to $97m. The remaining Others category rose 1 per cent to $870m. ®
InfoWorld: Companies still worried about open-source security
by Chris Kanaracus
Businesses in North America and Europe remain broadly worried about the security of open source software, according to new data from Forrester Research.
Fifty-eight percent of the large companies surveyed said they had security concerns about open source, while the figure for small and midsized businesses was slightly higher, at about two-thirds. Within those groups, only 9 percent of enterprises said they were "very concerned," compared with 45 percent for the SMBs.
More than half of SMBs (57 percent) also expressed concern that open-source software would be complex and hard to adopt, but only 32 percent of enterprises expressed a similar sentiment. In addition, 68 percent of SMBs cited the availability of service and support for open-source software as a concern, compared with 47 percent of enterprises.
The findings are among a wide range of data Forrester collected for two reports, "The State of SMB Software: 2009" and "The State of Enterprise Software: 2009."
Meanwhile, security concerns over SaaS (software as a service) seem to be diminishing among companies large and small, according to Forrester.
The research firm polled a subset of SMB respondents who indicated they weren't interested in SaaS. Twenty-seven percent named security as a factor, compared to 57 percent in a 2007 survey. A similar poll of enterprises saw 31 percent cite security concerns with SaaS, down from 47 percent in an earlier study.
Overall, Forrester polled 2,227 IT executives and technology decision makers in the U.S., Canada, Germany, France and the UK between December 2008 and February this year.
CNet: Twitter and blogs: Post once and bail out
by Dave Rosenberg
For all of its glory, Twitter is apparently not as sticky as many social media buffs would like it to be. A recent Harvard Business School study reported that 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. (I wrote about Twitter's lack of loyalty back in April.)
However, I don't think it really matters. As with any service or piece of software, a rising tide lifts all boats, so a core user base can propel a service for quite a while. Somewhere down the line however, Twitter as a company will need to put programs and efforts into place to encourage people to actually use the service if it ever plans to monetize it.
The fact that 10 percent of users are driving 90 percent of the content is not dramatically different than what you see with sites like Wikipedia, or with personal blogs, which have an even lower rate of consistent publishing. According to a 2008 study by Technorati, 95 percent of the blogs they track hadn't been updated in at least four months.
Orphaned tweets, like orphaned blogs, are just as much part of the social fabric as anything else. The fact is that people abandon stuff all the time--TV shows, books, whatever. We shouldn't be remotely shocked that someone bails out of blogging or something else that could be considered work.
If you are not motivated in some way to make the effort to blog or use Twitter you will sooner or later realize you could be doing something else. That's the great thing about choice--but it's also the risk for companies like Twitter that haven't yet figured out how to make money.
There is another parallel to be drawn with open-source development. A core team of developers are typically paid by a company and write 90 percent of the code, while the last 10 percent or so may done by the community.
Any community or user-generated content falls into the traps-a mass of people need to be motivated to do things for some kind of gain. Without a core group of contributors there will be no momentum at all.
