If it's storage, it's got to be IBM

Virtualization will be a key driver in industry growth over the next few
years

At least that's what IBM wants its customers to believe. The company took
representatives from some prospective customers and its partner organizations to
the exotic city of Miyazaki in Japan on a two-day visit. (May 22-24, 2005). The
objective was to create awareness about its comprehensive storage offer-ings and
how it was geared to take its customers to the next level of infrastructure
management.

The conference, which was called the 'IBM AP Total-Storage Customer Summit
2005' had over 400 attendees. McData, Brocade and Cisco were the cosponsors
for this event. The presence of all these companies under a single roof was
targeted at bolstering the confidence of the attending members that a concerted
effort to integrate multi-product and multi-vendor storage management solutions
is on.

Sharing the results of certain market research, IBM impressed upon the
audience how it outgrew the external disk market in Q1, 2005. Its APAC disk
business grew 28 percent year-on-year in this period, while market grew at three
percent. IBM attributes part of this success to the launch of the new DS8000,
which comes with a four-year warranty. The company has also started bagging
orders, especially from India, for another new product-the DS4800.

IBM also stressed upon the fact that virtualization will be a key driver in
industry growth over the next few years. It outlined its technology roadmap in
this space, highlighting the business advantages of moving up to storage
virtualization, going beyond SAN/NAS solutions. Steve Legg, Chief Architecture,
IBM Storage said that these integrated solutions will encompass not just IBM's
product suites, but those of its competitors as well. This will give customers
the mobility of managing storage from a single workflow-based admi-nistration
console.

Another initiative that IBM aggressively promoted was its 'On-Demand
Business' strategy.

Andy Monshow, GM, IBM

Vinita Bhatia

Miyazaki/Japan