Was talking with a friend of mine this week and he said that strategic planning has been deemphasized these last few years mainly due to the economic climate.  We have discussed this before (see Strategy, as we know it, is dead). Most companies are in a struggle to survive and had little time or resources [...]

Chuck Hollis from EMC wrote a post last week on Storage is software about how hardware parts are becoming commoditized and so highly functional that future storage differentiation will only come from software.  I commented that hardware differentiation is also becoming much easier with FPGAs and their ilk.  Chuck replied that yes this may be so [...]

A recent Gizmodo blog post compared a decade of R&D at Sony, Microsoft and Apple.  There were some interesting charts but mostly it showed that R&D as a percent of revenue, fluctuates from year to year and R&D spend has been rising for all the companies (although at different rates). Overall from a percentage of Revenue [...]

All the news about iPad and iBooks app got me thinking. There’s been much discussion on e-book pricing but no one is looking at what to charge for items other than books.  I look at this as something like what happened to albums when iTunes came out.  Individual songs were now available without having to [...]

Oracle buys Sun, EMC buys Data Domain, Cisco buys Tandberg, it seems like every month another major billion dollar acquisition occurs.  Part of this is because of the recent economic troubles, which now values many companies at the lowest they have been for many years and thus, making it cheaper to acquire good (and/or failing) [...]

The chart to the left was sent out in last months SCI newsletter and shows the throughput attained by various storage systems when running the SPECsfs(R) 2008 CIFS and NFS benchmarks. The scatter-plot shows data for NAS systems that have published both NFS and CIFS SPECsfs benchmark results for the same storage system. To date [...]