Storage Effect

The Internet infrastructure is incredibly storage dense, and will become even more so

Historically, “infractructures” have been a means to get from here to there: railways, waterways, highways, pipelines, powerlines, phone lines.  The build-out of the internet infrastructure looks different in one aspect: beyond the broadband “pipes”, there is a massive and growing storage base, housed in data centers, that accounts for a major part of this infrastructure’s investment. 

The trend will continue as the pipes get bigger and the content gets “heavier” from higher resolution video content and growing message sizes.  The internet relies on storage as much as connections.  Keep your eyes peeled for growing opportunity with a “pure bytes” play in your solutions.

On a related note, Seagate was part of the UK Internet Awards the other night - congrats to UKFast, winner of the Seagate-sponsored Best Dedicated Hosting Award.  UKFast is a great example of making the most of the newest infrastructure.

Look out world - here come digital downloads!

This post on Egypt’s problems with network outages seemed mundane when I first read it.    But then I read between the lines: Movie downloads are seriously impacting a developing country’s day-to-day economy!

When I think of Egypt’s economy, digital entertainment doesn’t come to mind.  Yet digital content has risen to a top economic priority due to unexpected but very understandable infrastructure problems.   Why is this such a big deal?  Because it’s evidence that third-world economies and their resulting digital needs will not lag the developed countires nearly as much as one might think.

The developing world is on a unique digital infrastructure path, bringing many poorer, high-population countries much more rapidly into the Digital World than their more economically developed brethren in the Americas, Asia and Europe.

This reminds me of conversations I had last week with our India team on the huge size of the Indian movie industry.  It goes way beyond Bollywood.  Indian production companies are today producing a disproportionate share of the world’s video content, and cinemas throughout India are converting to digital distribution at a rapid pace. 

The lesson here is that the Digital Age is a global phenomenon that will be driven more and more by population size than by per capita income. 

Ann at GigaOm reviewed “The Big Switch”, Nick Carr’s follow-on to “Does IT Matter?”.

I agree that the Big Switch is a good thing.  Change is always scary, but that doesn’t automatically make it ominous.  Often, it is how we get from there to here.

Carr’s comparisons to Edison and the electic grid are telling. Content is the new electricity, and society’s consumption of the new “power” is spawning new information appliances and industries that will be the modern-day Frigidaires, General Electrics and PG&Es.

It’s all good for content-enabling companies that are ready to adapt and evolve!

The easier it is to share content, the more valuable it becomes to the sharer. 

The natural laws of content ownership are evolving in the Web 2.0 world.  Robert Scoble sees this in his business.  It’s playing out in the entertainment world with Digital Rights Management.  The new paradox of content is that the easier it is to share, the more valuable it becomes to the sharer.  And the more of it there is.

What it means to solution providers is that more efficient data management driven by data de-duplication, CDP, virtualization and other technologies will propagate data growth, not impede it.  You’ll grow your storage business by helping your clients manage their information.  

That’s why they call it Information Technology.