Many storage vendors are sloppy at market research - particularly in the area of competitive research. This manifests itself in a number of ways.

Incorrect claims about technology firsts.

I often get a sense of deja vu when seeing press releases which claim that a company is the first to ship a certain type of technology or product. A quick bit of research in the STORAGEsearch news archives reveals that another company did exactly the same thing maybe 6 to 10 months before. When I query this with the press release originator the reply is often that they genuinely didn't know about the earlier product. If I do run the news item then I use my editorial prerogative to filter out the misleading "first" claim, while leaving the other facts intact.

Uncompetitive pricing.

It's surprising how often new products are launched at a price point which is significantly above other preexisting products which are functionally identical. If you exclude the memory market - which is a special case - in which the average selling price this year will be higher than in 2003 because of supply and demand issues - then other types of storage would normally follow a declining price curve over time. You'd be surprised how many times company A is promoting a storage product at twice the price of company B. When you look into it - you find that the company selling at the higher price doesn't seem to be aware who its competitors are or what price they're selling at. All they know for sure is that their sales don't seem to be growing as quickly as expected.

The root cause of this is that marketing managers are too busy (or inexperienced) to do competitive market research competently. But there's also a disincentive in venture capital backed companies to spend any money on market research at all. One experienced California based market research friend of mine commented about this phenomenon . He said the VCs and the founders think they know it all anyway, and they see no good reason for spending money to find out what they think they already know. That might account for the high failure rate of many well funded start ups - who close their eyes to the market once their business plan gets the money.

But the fact is you don't have to spend money on market reports to find out who your competitors are. Publications like STORAGEsearch group together companies in the same product catgory - and trawling through the web pages we link to can provide the basic information which many storage marketers seem to lack.

How does this affect users?

Users have to be vigilant about paying too much and they have to ignore many vendors' spurious claims about technology or market leadership. Even though the storage market is a commodity market, which should reduce price point variations, that's not happening. Instead it appears that imperfect market awareness in the storage vendor community creates much bigger price discrepencies than would be tolerated in more mature markets. By shopping around - users can sometimes pay 50% less for identical solutions.

How does this affect vendors? - and their Partners

Operating in a fog of marketing ignorance is a lot like driving at night with your eyes closed. Storage vendors who don't do competent market research crash and burn faster than those companies which are in tune with their customers, competitors and information sources in their market. Sadly, as teh record shows, the amount of venture capital funding is no guide to marketing quality. Big expensive cars crash too and make a bigger mess when they do.

What should storage marketers do?

By learning more about their competitors storage marketers can benefit too. Helping their companies get closer to reality might help some storage companies survive longer.