Jon Toigo  |
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Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners
en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC. |
09 februari 2012 - Numbers don’t lie
I have been going through my annual ritual of checking all of the published statistics from industry analysts. Firstly, I wanted to see who paid who to make projections that would push users toward their products. Secondly, I wanted to see where large discrepancies occur or where general alignment can be found. Frankly, I am finding too much to fit into one short column, but all of it feeds into a general feeling of the untrustworthiness of analyst data.
IDC’s data growth report is just disinformation
Cynicism
If you are one of those folks who swears by Gartner or IDC numbers, you probably won’t agree with me. But there seem to be enough doubters these days to make this column worth submitting to the discourse. One fellow with whom I spoke about industry analysts late last year, told me point-blank that if he had followed the guidance from analysts a decade ago, he would have been out of business today.
One firm advised him that all desktops would be gone by 2001 and that he should make the strategic decision to go with net PCs immediately. But the move to tablets and netbooks is just now happening. Another analyst told him that applications would shortly be sourced from application service providers (ASPs), so he should stop buying software licenses. ASPs—precursors to, but in many ways the same as today’s cloud service providers—mostly went belly-up within a year of that advice.
Today, my friend said, he collects and files all of the analysts’ findings. He still makes his own decisions about what to buy, though. But afterwards, he sifts through his files to find a report by an analyst whom had been paid enough to write favourably about the product—there always seems to be one. Then he staples the report to the proposal or purchase order request. “It makes the senior management think that the choice has analyst backing”, he offered in a voice dripping with cynicism.
Explosive
A central problem with most analyst findings is that they are couched in numbers, which, we are told, never lie. They sound factual, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The annual reports on the data explosion by IDC—or should I say EMC, since they pay for them—are clearly disinformation. Nobody actually knows how fast the volume of digital data is increasing. Yet IDC’s reports say that it is growing exponentially. They say that, ever since 2005, the amount of data that is being generated has been greater than the amount of storage capacity that companies had for recording it. This created a storage gap that should have caused an apocalypse. Only it didn’t, perhaps because most digitization of analog information has happened in the consumer space of books, games and DVDs and not in the business realm at all.
A year ago, Gartner claimed that companies would grow their storage infrastructure capacity by 300 per cent over the next three years. This summer, they subtly modified this finding and predicted 500 per cent growth over the same timeframe, driven largely by server virtualization. Now, in 2012, the same company claims that the volume of data will grow 650 per cent over the next four years. Again, the inflated expectations are due to the unforeseen issues of server virtualization. Like Republican presidential candidates in the USA, the analyst’s story seems to change depending on the audience they are addressing.
Disasterous
The stats I really enjoy reading are the ones having to do with business continuity and disaster-readiness. This is a concern to many of my clients. In their efforts to do more with less, they have placed extraordinary faith in the uninterrupted function of IT. At the same time, however, they have minimized the importance of internal IT. They defend this policy by stating that outsourcing everything to the cloud is a central component of their strategic horizon. Now that’s great for your IT staff’s morale!
Last year, PwC released a survey finding, which indicated that the number of firms with disaster recovery plans had fallen to just 39 per cent. Similarly startling was CA Technologies’ commissioned survey of US and European firms last year. It found downtime stats climbing: surveyed firms collectively suffered 127 million hours of IT service outages in 2010, with significant tangible and intangible losses attached. Doubtless, much of this downtime resulted from disk failures. According to Google and Carnegie Mellon University, 7 per cent of all drives breaks down within 24 months. This rate is significantly higher than the one proclaimed by the analysts—and their sponsors in the industry.