IBM Seeks Shootout With EMC Over Storage

One could almost see the saloon doors flapping, feel the dust coming off a dirt road and hear the unsnapping of holsters as IBM unveiled its new storage portfolio strategy today — clearly spoiling for a showdown with EMC.

Instead of selling customers standalone hardware, or hawking an single enhancement to a software tool as it’s done in the past, IBM is tying products and services together to help solve client issues — and to sell a combined toolbox of software, hardware and services.

It’s a method similar to the approach used by market leader EMC. But Big Blue said its new plan is heftier with products, and deeper, thanks to the variety of services it can add to the mix.

“We want to know what the issues are, what the concerns are and what is needed, so we can provide a tool set to help customers build and adjust infrastructures,” Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM System Storage, told InternetNews.com. “We aren’t offering a menu of products as that can be mind boggling. A lot of things are impacting the data center and we have the tools to help.”

Big Blue’s new approach comes as competition heats up for what’s remaining a lucrative market in a general downturn, given that storage spending continues to climb despite larger economic woes.

It also indicates IBM’s focus to shore up its customer interaction in providing and cross-selling storage solutions, according to one analyst.

“This is the single largest storage-related launch IBM has ever undertaken,” Mary Johnston Turner, a senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, told InternetNews.com. “This is a new go-to-market strategy that will require IBM’s sales and marketing organizations to engage in much more sophisticated conversations with customers.”

While IBM’s Andrews would not confirm that the new strategy is a move against storage leader EMC, he did admit that it’s “not inconsistent with what others are doing.”

“But we have all the fundamentals, better capabilities and massive IT centers where we are developing new technologies,” he added. “We’re learning from our own experiences and environments of customers and bringing that experience into play for other customers.”

In debuting its strategy, IBM also announced 10 new products and enhancements to nearly 20 others. New offerings include a 1TB tape drive, an in-line, de-duplication tool and added services offerings. Enhancements include expanding security and encryption key management across product lines, a high-density tape storage library frame and an upgraded disk offering for mainframes.

EMC sticks to its guns

However, its rival didn’t flinch when asked about IBM’s new approach.

“EMC first saw the shift in the flow of the world’s data several years ago and has been developing and delivering innovative information infrastructure solutions that address the challenges that IBM describes at a pace unmatched in the industry,” a spokesperson told InternetNews.com.

The company pointed to a recent IDC report that noted EMC’s market growth of 19.7 percent in worldwide external disk storage systems outshined IBM, which had 14.3 percent growth, and even outdid market growth overall, which was 16.7 percent.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020