UPDATED 08:24 EDT / MARCH 26 2013

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Storage 2012 – Boring + Irrelevant. The Sad Tech Version of Nielsen?

Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for midrange and high-end storage arrays is out, and according to a blog post from Wikibon’s chief analyst Dave Vellante, it’s a mashup of different protocols, formats, sizes and shapes.

In a word describing this report – Boring.

Ok one more word – Irrelevant.

Here’s the issue in my opinion – in emerging disruptive markets like storage is today, these kind of “pure play segmentation” reports are just not relevant to the what is going on in the IT community. Gartner is looking in the rear view mirror and is becoming passé in the process.

I’ve had several conversations with true innovators in the storage space, from customers to vendors that are putting forth a vision for what infrastructure looks like in the future, and it’s nothing like what’s described in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant. Gartner needs to get rid of its outdated mainframe-like view of the world, and come into this century.

The future of infrastructure is:

.

*Software-led

*Flexible

*Scale out

*Open Source

*Multi-lingual

*Highly automated

*Way, way less expensive than traditional storage

*Much more efficient than today’s systems

Storage in today’s landscape doesn’t fit neatly into a box on a chart. Storage is crossing multiple marketplaces, which makes a Magic Quadrant analysis incongruent with what customers are looking at.  The market for storage will look more like hyperscale computing environments than today’s traditional IT data centers. I’m talking HP Moonshot-like (ARM based) low power servers, Fusion-io-like architectures that eliminate storage overheads, Nutanix-like converged infrastructure that truly scale, Hadoop-like approaches that ship code to data, not stuff data into a “God Box,” intelligent machine learning algorithms that make the system smart.  A platform based on a set of open standards, not a collection of bolted on features and functions and a zillion boxes with different operating systems.

For the past ten to twelve years, the theme of traditional enterprise IT has been to do more with less. The thing is, companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google and LinkedIn and countless other innovators have decided that technology can be applied for a competitive advantage. Facebook and Amazon spend $1 billion annually on capital equipment – mostly on technology infrastructure. The difference is they understand value creation and at the heart of this value creation is a new data storage model. Moreover, software engineering will play a very important role in the future of storage. All of this is not captured in the report. If you take into account what I just wrote above you can flip the vendors in the upper right quadrant.

By Garnter’s definition, the firms investing in the value proposition for software-led infrastructure would look like laggards not leaders. Folks that is a #fail.

What about the big data impact? Data and information used to be viewed as a costly burden that needs to be managed. But true innovators look at data as a source of value that can be enhanced and transformed into dollars. But the world needs new thinking to see this vision forward and Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant totally misses the boat. I don’t understand how those guys make so much money wasting time. If I were a client and was paying for this report I’d ask them to please tell me something I don’t know already.

The New Rules

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* Richer & social media makes companies smarter
* Buzz & conversation counts
* Data can be crowdsourced
* Quality content is a science
* Big data can read users/companies mind (e.g.Artifical Intelligence Machine Learning)
* More Competition = Better Content/Data
* It’s not just about the single version of the truth – aka the big “report”

The Magic Quadrant may have had its day, but it’s over.  Gartner and it’s Magic Quadrant might fall victim of new data to refute its’ leadership.  What is happening with Gartner reminds me of what is happening with Nielsen and TV measurement.  Nielsen is considered the standard for what TV shows are successful with the audience. Yet with social media and new big data technologies it turns out Nielsen data is completely wrong in providing accurate insight into the real value to audiences. Wired magazine wrote about this recently (link: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/nielsen-family-is-dead/). Turns out that networks and advertisers are using all-new metrics to design hit shows. Under these new rules, Twitter feeds are as important as ratings, fresh ideas beat tired formulas, and niche stars can be as valuable as big names.

These new social, measurable data sources bring us into a new exciting era of data reporting and research. Gartner is exposed. Open content and new data source might just kill the Magic Quadrant.

Who understands this? Joe Tucci, Pat Gelsinger, Paul Maritz, Meg Whitman, Jeff Hammerbacher and the cloud era crew, Hortonworks, David Flynn, etc.


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