You talk about the evolution of data protection. Can you tell us about where it's at today and where it's headed?
I believe a lot of work and investment is under way in the industry to think of this as an inflection point, where everything gets better. Tape gets better in terms of its system-availability features. There's a lot of work we're doing to improve performance, improve management, put more error reporting and reliability features in tape drives with things like DLTSage. Disk... is becoming more affordable, which helps customers.
A few years out, what really is going to be ideal is that these things are, in some ways, going to merge together. People are going to use tape for certain things and disk for certain things. Software is going to explode in terms of "information lifecycle management" -- (that is), being able to have a piece of data flow through its life in a system, be stored on disk for ready access for a certain period of time, (and) be archived for a certain period of time. If it's information that should never change and never be altered, it can be put on certain media that going to insure that it stays there forever.
A variety of intelligence will be added, using disk, using tape, using a variety of technologies.
Where is that intelligence going to come from? Is that coming from the software providers, where you have a console, where you can set policy for data or a particular volume -- you know, "by this date, move it here"?
It's going to remain to be seen where it comes from, but it's being addressed by a number of people. Certainly EMC is definitely, by their acquisitions, working to drive that. I know Veritas Software (and) the storage software companies are certainly addressing it. I think IBM and StorageTek (have) worked in this area as well... The people that are in the best position to do it are the storage software companies like Veritas and others, who have a platform.
What's your take on where spending on information technology is headed, through the remainder of this year to 2004?
Budgets, I think, are improving, but I they're still very tight. Much of that money is still being spent to improve the infrastructure. People still -- in the IT area -- are not pursuing new applications. They aren't spending wildly. They don't have big budgets in that respect. But as their budgets improve, they're going back and doing projects that are largely infrastructure-oriented.
