The commoditization of storage and growing user demand for greater performance are behind the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions in the cloud storage space, according to industry experts.
Among the more recent activities in the market include Avago Technologies Ltd.’s acquisition of LSI Corp., the purchase by Seagate of Xyratec and the acquisitions of Whiptail by Cisco, IBM’s xSeries business by Lenovo and Airwatch by VMware.
Existing storage, compute and management software architectures are rapidly becoming commoditized, according to Gil Hecht, CEO of Continuity Software. This in turn push the development of newer storage, compute and management software architectures offer far better performance.
Major vendors are left with no choice “but to catch up of drop from the race,” said Hecht.
Greg Goetz, CEO of CloudEye, believes user expectations for flexibility and ease of use of cloud technologies also play a major role.
Flash devices and solid state drives have gotten rid of the performance bottlenecks and have encouraged innovation in storage architectures that now include hybrid solutions he said.
“…new startups and new approaches are moving storage solutions forward” to keep pace with cloud service providers,” said Goetz.
Greg Schulz, analysts for StorageIO Group also observed a sudden surge in the amount of money available for investment in technology.
He said there are many purchasing opportunities for companies that want to expand their portfolios into new areas.
“Flash remains popular along with cloud, virtual and software define storage activity, hence the focus in these areas,” said Schulz.