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Top 10 Storage Markets to Watch: Page 2 of 4

No. 6: Government. The top 20 IT contracts for which the U.S. federal government has issued RFPs for fiscal 2007 amount to over $120 million, according to an October 2006 report by research firm INPUT. That's a sizeable chunk of change, and we think plenty of it goes to storage.

IDC says government, including federal, Department of Defense, and state and local entities, accounted for 11.9 percent of storage spending in the U.S. in 2006. IBM is one example of a vendor that's glommed onto the opportunity. (See IBM: In a State.) But there's little doubt that other leading storage players are keeping government in their sights.

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No. 5: Healthcare. While the healthcare market accounts for 5 percent of all IT spending, according to Goldman Sachs, we think the segment is bigger than that when it comes to consumption of storage. Indeed, IDC says healthcare is the vertical for which the most storage growth is forecast worldwide.

A large part of storage for healthcare is driven by better record-keeping, as mandated by HIPAA and other regulations that call for data on patients to be saved forever, literally. (See Service Providers Target Healthcare.) We see no waning here.