storagesearch.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Megabyte the Mouse is 4 Years Old

Baughurst, Hampshire, UK - September 3, 2002 - Megabyte the Mouse, the cartoon character known to more than 0.5 million unique annual readers of STORAGEsearch.com is four years old this month. Four years is a long time in the life of a mouse, and also in the life of a fast moving market like enterprise storage. In that time hundreds of storage companies have disappeared from the market, as they went bust, or merged or got acquired, but the total number of storage companies listed in the STORAGEsearch.com web site has kept growing.

Since the slowdown during the US IT recession in 2001, the network storage market has been growing back upto the historic high levels of $24 billion achieved in 2000 according to a recent report by California based market research company Peripheral Concepts. However, an earlier (May 2002) feature on the mouse site, which looked at the fastest growing profitable US storage companies revealed the worrying problem that few if any storage companies are currently making a profit in a fiercely competitive market which makes the recovery look in many ways worse than the recession.

STORAGEsearch.com was the second major publication to come out from privately owned ACSL, whose SPARC Product Directory has been a landmark publication in the Sun Microsystems compatible workstation and server market since 1992.

"I wasn't too sure how seriously people within the industry would accept the mouse site" admits publisher and editor Zsolt Kerekes. "But 2002 was our second year partnering with many of the most significant storage conferences and exhibitions in the USA and Europe, so I suppose STORAGEsearch.com has been accepted. At a time when the number of storage related publications on the web has risen to over one hundred, it's nice to see that our readership is still growing."

Kerekes puts this success down to the high quality network of content providers which includes marketers and PRs in hundreds of leading companies within the storage market. "We're only as good as the content we get. However it's gratifying to see that many of the home grown articles which analyse trends and successful companies within the industry are also popular features on the web site. That part is easy. If you look at the statistics of a large vertical buyers guide you will start to see trends emerging one to two quarters before they get reported within the financial results of companies in the market."

ACSL, publisher of STORAGEsearch.com, has been a profitable dotcom publisher for many years. ACSL's advertising revenue has experienced double digit revenue growth for the past four years. As newly emerging storage technologies like InfiniBand and Serial ATA start to get into volume production it's hard for analysts to confidentally pick and choose the long term winners in the storage market. But whatever the future may hold in store, mice will definitely be an important part of the enterprise storage landscape.