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A Matter of Opinion

When you write about an area as volatile as storage networking, you're bound to make someone mad. Indeed, as an old editor of mine used to say, you aren't doing your job unless you're generating heat as well as light.

Well, we succeeded in making someone really mad last night by publishing the first of a series of articles on de-duplication by analyst George Crump of Storage Switzerland.

A lone ranger with the handle of "hutchins" wrote on the message board and email that Crump's first installment favored one vendor's de-dupe approach to the exclusion of others. He demanded to know whether George had been paid for work with de-dupe vendors in the past. Not happy with the analyst's answer, he challenged the article on a number of points.

In fairness, we at Byte and Switch took a risk in publishing George Crump's article as a news story. Normally, that wouldn't be a big issue: Arguably, nearly every storage analyst working out there today has been or is currently being paid for work by vendors. (In fact, my predecessor at this publication generated a small firestorm when he pointed this out very specifically a few years back.) This state of affairs does not stop us from quoting analysts and publishing their work. If an analyst is credible as a legitimate distiller of industry information, that is usually apparent and widely acknowledged.

In our view, George Crump is one of the credible analysts.

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