Conspiracy Theory

If you had a conspiratorial mindset, you might suspect that there was a secret organization at work, a kind of storage vendor cartel laboring in the background to garner a greater and greater percentage of IT spending for the wares of its members . For the sake of argument, let's call them the Engineers for the Accelerated Total Depletion of Information Storage Components (EATDISC). ^[1]

With a bit of imagination , you can envision the group . Think organized criminal underworld, a la SPECTRE in the 1960s James Bond movies or the Mafiosi capo regimes in contemporary gangster films or cable TV's The Sopranos .

You might imagine this group meeting in some isolated alpine retreat, possibly situated in a facility carved out of a jagged rock face somewhere in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where it would be near the development shops of many storage companies. Picture an assemblage of stone-faced men (and maybe one or two women) wearing $1,500 suits , all seated with their cigars and brandies around a great mahogany table. They listen attentively to one presentation after another, each one describing the progress of various nefarious programs and initiatives intended to bring about the global domination of IT spending by data storage technologies.

Imagine that EATDISC has cultivated " friends " in the technology trade press, where they purchase the bulk of the advertising, and in the industry analyst community, where they buy "friendly" coverage for a small sum of a few hundred thousand dollars per year ”small, because it is an infinitesimal fraction of the $25 billion in revenues that disk-based storage was (conservatively) expected to generate in 2002, and smaller still as disk-based storage purchasing climbs to more than $30 billion by 2004. ^[2] For an investment of what amounts to pocket change, EATDISC virtually ensures that no negative press will surface about its members' products and that the two primary sources of information for end-users regarding their technology options are tightly controlled.

Imagine further that these powerful figures control vast cadres of value-added resellers (VARs) and integrators who recommend EATDISC products as "solutions" to their customers based not on how effectively they will meet actual application requirements, but what profit margin the recommended solution will yield to the reseller/integrator. Their rationale is simple: Why sell a customer one or two components that will deliver a rich, redundant, and manageable solution to his or her immediate problem when you could sell a complex, multicomponent storage area network (SAN) that the customer could "grow into" over time, and that, by coincidence , delivers immediate profits to the reseller and vendor?

Savvy customers would see through such a scam, you think? Not if the customer depends on a "trusted solution provider" ”a reseller or integrator ”to chart his or her strategic path . ^[3] Not if the customer has been convinced by analysts' reports and trade press articles that SANs are strategic. Not if the IT manager or chief technology officer or chief information officer finds his or her decision making undercut by vendor or reseller salespersons who do "end runs" around the company technologists and cultivate sales directly with nontechnical chief financial officers or chief executive officers.

Imagine still further that the organizations responsible for developing " open storage standards" find their efforts stymied by their very openness, which permits representatives of EATDISC member companies to sit on, and in some cases even to chair , standards development committees . The vendor representatives could obfuscate progress on any initiative that might cost their firms "value discriminators," resisting common standards that might that contribute directly or indirectly to the erosion of their company's respective market share leadership. The irony of this situation is that, at the same time as the vendor representative obstructs progress on standards development, the representative's company can legitimately claim to be "actively engaged in the open standards development process," intent as it is upon providing less proprietary solutions for its customers.

Last but not least, imagine that EATDISC was as expert at manipulating the legal system as it was at manipulating data bits. What if large member companies leveraged loopholes in the patent and trademarks registration process to file " blanket patents" that covered all technological development in a given area ”even development based on ideas not yet thought of ”then used its legal authority to stifle innovation that EATDISC did not sanction ?

In short, what if such a cartel worked earnestly behind the scenes to ensure that customer hearts and minds and dollars were continuously cultivated to support the acquisition of proprietary and half-baked technologies, premised upon the flimsiest and most untenable of business value propositions , that resisted common management and required forklift upgrades every one or two years ?

Taken collectively, the above scenario would certainly provide an explanation for why something that is increasingly a commodity ”like disk-based storage technology ”is costing organizations more of their IT budget than ever before. Without a doubt, many industry events over the past few years would appear to validate some or all of the conspiracy theory advanced above.

But, of course, the existence of EATDISC is purely paranoiac fantasy. In reality, such a cartel would require levels of discipline and cooperation that the storage industry has never been able to manifest. The possibility of a real-world EATDISK runs afoul of long-standing fears among storage technology vendors that prevent such a cooperative cartel from ever appearing.