Storage Decisions attendees got the chance to corroborate their own opinions and purchase plans for 2004 with those of 500 of their peers recently, as Mark Schlack, editorial director of TechTarget's Storage Media Group, took the stage to share findings from Storage magazine's 2004 purchasing intentions survey.
The yearly survey, conducted via e-mail in August 2003, tracked the purchasing landscape of 500 storage managers and administratos with direct purchasing authority, Schlack said. The average annual storage budget of survey respondents was over $2 million.
Schlack painted a broad picture of the survey's key findings. Interjecting some cautious optimism, he revealed an uptick in 2004 storage spending plans over 2003 spending. He also noted that spending patterns for the coming year looked to be shifting into a more balanced approach with less emphasis on hardware spending than there had been in 2003.
When asked what type of storage they planned to purchase in 2004, Schlack reported 83% of the respondents said that some form of networked storage purchase would make up over half of all the year's storage purchases. The primary motivator for networked storage buys? No real surpise here, Schlack said, noting that consolidation efforts continued to drive the bulk of the networked storage purchases.
Schlack went on to share results pertaining to respondents' primary vendors in 2004 for such areas as disk subsystems, tape and storage management software.
Mark Schlack's associated presentation slides and links to other of the session proceedings are available here.
About the speaker: Mark Schlack is the editor-in-chief of Storage magazine and the editorial director of TechTarget's Storage Media Group.
