Sanders: I think the market has been slower than everybody would have thought. The original confusion was, is SAN management part of SRM, or is SRM part of SAN management? Then we found most customers are more focused on availability than optimization. I would have guessed the driver for SRM would be optimization, because very few companies have growing IT budgets right now... I still think SRM is a logical part of the portfolio and something you wonder how you lived without.
Byte and Switch: Was buying TrelliSoft the right move, in hindsight? [See IBM Snaps Up TrelliSoft.]
Sanders: I think that TrelliSoft was an excellent acquisition. I can clearly say that, because I had nothing to do with that. I started the day we closed. One, it's a very intelligent tie between storage management and systems management. So it's the hub around which you optimize your storage and ensure its availability. It's also able to say to the systems management guys, "Hey, this is what's happening over here." The other reason I think it was an excellent acquisition is that it fits into our philosophy: It's Java-based, it's open, it works across all hardware environments. We had customers that came from TrelliSoft that are getting value right away.
Byte and Switch: BMC Software Inc. [NYSE: BMC] recently pulled the plug on its storage software group. Doesn't that indicate that the pie is too small in this space? [See BMC Folds Storage Unit.]
Sanders: I don't think it's a question of the pie being too small. I think storage management on its own is absolutely critical. Storage management as part of managing the larger part of your business will be the new table stakes. Clearly, so many people were making money from the differentiation in the hardware layer like EMC and they can't do that anymore, so I think that's driving interest in this area. Also, there are parts of the data protection market, even though it's not a triple-digit growth area, there are areas of opportunity. Like email: How are you going to handle the data protection in a very specific way, including regulatory compliance?
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