Where will storage go over the next 15 years? We rub our crystal ball

Follow the money – or, at least, our projections

Scenario prediction

Our chart shows this scenario:

What our scenario predicts is that the two groups of seven large suppliers and 100 or so smaller suppliers will be fighting over business in a diminishing pool of on-premises opportunities. Inevitably, we think the numbers will shrink in a game of musical IT chairs with chairs (on-premises sales opportunities) going away, leaving a surplus of suppliers.

The chart shows this with our seven suppliers reduced to five in the 2020-2025 period, and the 100 or so smaller fry cut back to 70. There will be supplier consolidation and exits. It will be like the 1980-2015 tape market writ much, much larger; business blood on the streets.

We also show the flash storage proportion of the on-premises IT business growing, thinking that much capacity storage will stay on disk and much of that will move to the cloud.

All on-premises IT suppliers will take a view of this and decide whether to stay in the on-premises IT business as a general supplier or to retreat into a defensible niche, such as developing a rounded analytics stack for a vertical market.

The general storage system suppliers are headed for a bruising battle from which there will be casualties. What’s happening to Imation is a precursor of that. Suppliers can bulk up to get better in their niche, with HGST and SanDisk’s acquisitions if flash assets examples of that. IBM buying Cleversafe is another.

But the huge, huge question in our minds is whether any current storage or IT system on-premises supplier will go into the public cloud business. IBM has its SoftLayer, Oracle its cloud, HP its hesitant Helion, and VMware its vCloud Air.

El Reg storage desk's take is that any large storage supplier, or on-premises IT supplier generally, should and must go into the public cloud business. We think that public cloud suppliers are nearer to banks and airlines than utilities, and this is intuition, gut feel; we have no better intelligence than anyone else.

We believe that phase 1 of Dell’s business was PCs, with phase 2 being servers and the enterprise, and the EMC acquisition crowning that. Our thinking is that Dell should double down on VMware’s vCloud Air business and, using Pivotal and Virtustream assets, focus on building a great public cloud business as its Phase 3.

Follow the puck

In ice hockey-speak, follow the puck and go where it’s going.

If our scenario is correct, business customers for IT will increasingly use the public cloud and will also increasing use converged and hyper-converged systems and software-only/commodity hardware storage. There will be business to be had in building hybrid clouds but these are essentially umbrellas, helping to keep the public cloud rain from your head while a tidal wave is coming against which umbrellas are no defence.

You need a wet suit and buoyancy aid, and the best buoyancy aid is building your own public cloud business.

Hitachi can do that with its multi-faceted Internet-of-Things, analytics software (think Pentaho), sensing systems, HDS storage and compute systems.

Cisco is somewhat isolated, having enterprise network and server expertise, but little or no upper stack software (no virtualisation) and gone through self-destruction with its Invicta flash array storage. It needs to buy into virtualisation, analytics and storage, and quickly - but this is El Reg storage desk making the tentative prediction, rather than Gartner or any other analyst group/research house.