• Press Office

The Economic Meltdown

By Adrian Wood, Business development manager, Shoden Data Systems, June 2011

The economic meltdown experienced across the globe seems to have triggered a number of large acquisitions within the technology industry over recent times.

Specifically looking at the storage industry, we have seen some of the largest vendors absorb a number of smaller players, starting with the acquisition of Data Domain by EMC, IBM taking on XIV and StorWise, HP beating Dell with the acquisition of 3PAR, leaving Dell to finally settle for Compellent, and in this week Oracle announcing that it is buying Pillar Data Systems.

It’s fair to say the merger and acquisition wheels will continue rolling well into the future as a vehicle to acquire new technology and clients, and intimately demonstrate continuous growth for shareholders, as most of these companies are listed entities anyway.

This trend which is in itself significant has now spun-off the foundation for the “packaged” product solution set from almost all of the vendors described above. Customers are being continuously bombarded by various marketing campaigns around clouds, stacks, pods and any other branded metaphor that vendors are using to describe their unique solution offering. Some have compared these vertically integrated solutions as a return to the mainframe mindset whereby a single infrastructure stack provides centralised end-to-end management, functionality and performance.

What is amusing with these new technology products is that almost all of the major vendors that have been preaching distributed systems and open standards over the last two decades have now chosen to rekindle the supposedly extinct concept of the mainframe.

The main question that customers are attempting to understand is the impact of these acquisitions to their businesses and whether such mass consolidation is beneficial to them and the industry as a whole?  Case in point is Hewlett Packard’s current legal dispute with Oracle over their decision to cease supporting Intel's Itanium architecture in future versions of Oracle's database software will only add to customer’s uncertainty on what the future holds.

About Shoden

Shoden Data Systems PTY (Ltd.) provides innovative, high-end technology solutions to leading organisations across Africa, allowing them to gain what Shoden refers to as:“The data centre advantage”. Shoden aims to deliver the data centre advantage by understanding clients’ challenges and implementing optimised solutions that address these challenges, coupled with excellent service and support. www.shoden.co.za

For further information

Melinda de Gee
Shoden Data Systems
083 212 9840
Melinda.degee@shoden.co.za