Data Overview

Data presented in this brief was collected via a survey of 515 senior IT professionals at North American and Western European enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) and midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) organizations.[1] Respondents were asked to provide a number of details regarding the current profile of their IT organization, including their total number of IT staff and how those employees are allocated across different functional areas.  Respondents’ total number of IT staff is presented in Figure 1 and Table 1, while data on functional allocations is presented in Figures 2-5. Key findings of this research include:

• The average IT organization devotes 30% of its staff resources to infrastructure and operations, 23% to application maintenance, 21% to application development, 13% to planning/architecture, and 12% to management and administration (see Figure 2).
• Larger organizations—as measured by number of overall employees (see Figure 3) or number of IT staff (see Figure 4)—are more likely to allocate a higher percentage of IT staff to areas such as application development and a lower percentage of staff to infrastructure and operations.
• Similarly, “leading-edge” IT consumers (i.e., early adopters of new technologies and generally IT-centric organizations overall) allocate a significantly higher percentage of staff resources to strategic areas such as application development and planning/architecture functions.  Conversely, these organizations employ fewer staff on a percentage basis to manage IT infrastructure and operations (see Figure 5).

Most Organizations Will Grow or Maintain IT Staffing Levels in 2010

In a recent survey of 515 senior IT professionals at North American and Western Europe midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations,[1] ESG asked respondents about expected changes in IT staffing levels in 2010. The good news is that only 1% of IT organizations plan to eliminate a significant number of jobs with another 13% expecting to cut a small amount of positions.  Conversely, 38% of respondents will add IT headcount and almost half will maintain current staff levels—both indicators of a steadily improving economy (see Figure 1). From a company size perspective, enterprise organizations are more apt to be adding jobs than their midmarket counterparts (44% vs. 30%), but they are also nearly twice as likely to be reducing 2010 IT staffing levels. For their part, midmarket organizations are less bifurcated in their plans and are more apt to maintain the status quo: some 61% will maintain IT staffing levels this year.

IT Staffing Trends Closely Tied to 2010 IT Spending Plans

Upon additional analysis, ESG discovered that 2010 IT employment plans were closely correlated with overall IT spending expectations.  As shown in Figure 2, 62% of organizations that expect to increase 2010 IT spending will also add new IT jobs, while only 4% will resort to layoffs.  Likewise, IT headcount is not expected to change from 2009 to 2010 for nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents with the same IT budget levels as 2009, while almost half (48%) of organizations with decreased IT spending plans will cut existing IT-related positions.

The correlation between IT staffing levels and overall spending plans is also evident when the data is analyzed by industry.  In other words, the vertical industries most likely to be planning to add IT jobs in 2010 are those most likely to be increasing 2010 IT spending levels, namely health care (51% will add new IT staff positions in 2010), communications & media (50%), federal government (48%), and financial (47%) (see Figure 3).[2] State and local government (27%), manufacturing (27%), and education (25%), on the other hand, were much less likely to report expanding IT employment over the next 12 months. Of these, state and local government agencies were the most likely to see declining IT staffing levels, with 29% of these organizations expecting to cut existing IT jobs in 2010.

ESG also discovered an interesting correlation between IT hiring plans and current IT budget allocations.  Specifically, respondents to ESG’s 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey report that on average, 34% of their annual IT budget is devoted to staff costs.  As shown in Table 1, it appears that organizations—whether consciously or unconsciously—are predisposed to regulate IT hiring so as to align costs with this industry average.  For example, organizations that are planning to add IT staff positions in 2010 report current staff costs that are significantly less than average (when viewed as a percentage of their overall IT budget).  On the other hand, organizations that are planning to eliminate IT jobs in 2010 are currently spending more on IT staff (again, as a percent of their overall IT budget) and would therefore have a greater incentive to reduce headcount and associated costs.

2010 IT Staffing Outlook by Company Psychographics and Business Initiatives

Ultimately, information technology is so integral to the operations of today’s public-and private-sector institutions that customers cannot postpone IT investments, including those tasked with supporting these purchases, indefinitely. Indeed, ESG’s research suggests that organizations with the most aggressive, risk-tolerant management teams understand this reality and, as such, are willing to invest in both the cutting-edge technologies and the staff necessary to support them, regardless of the economic climate.  As demonstrated in Figure 4, organizations with more risk-tolerant management teams (i.e., senior management team “takes many risks”) are much more likely than their counterparts at more conservative firms (74% vs. 29%) to be adding new IT staff positions in the coming year.

In addition to the risk tolerance of management teams, an organization’s typical IT purchasing pattern also displays a strong link to 2010 staffing plans. This means that most IT shops that stay on top of the latest technology trends understand that successful implementation and support of the products in their environments requires sufficient staffing. It follows, then, that 59% of these “leading-edge” IT consumers will add new staff positions in 2010 compared to only 23% of “laggard consumers” (see Figure 5).

ESG also indentified a number of business initiatives impacting overall IT spending that were strongly correlated to increased IT staffing plans.  As shown in Table 2, respondents citing initiatives like international expansion, business growth (whether organic or the result of M&A activities), and/or security and risk management projects were much more likely to be adding new IT staff positions in 2010 (new overseas facilities and business growth have obvious IT headcount implications, while the correlation with security and risk management initiatives reflects the ongoing shortage of qualified security specialists that many organizations will look to address this year in light of ever increasing regulatory and legal requirements). At the other end of the spectrum, the likelihood of reducing IT headcount more than doubles among organizations citing cost reduction initiatives as an important business priority for the next 12-18 months.

IT Hiring Priorities

What specific skills and roles will IT hiring managers be looking for in 2010? Figure 6 offers some additional insight.  This chart suggests that organizations looking to add new IT staff positions in 2010 may be most likely to do so in areas where they are currently lacking the requisite IT staff and/or skills levels—for example, virtualization deployment and administration (64%) and information security (59%).  In addition to filling gaps and boosting skills in these strategic areas of IT, organizations also appear to have a need to plug holes in more operational roles such as data center operations and help desk.  Note that in almost all areas of IT, organizations with 2010 IT hiring plans are more likely to express a need for new staff resources and skills than are those organizations maintaining or decreasing IT staff positions in 2010, suggesting that they will look to add positions across all of the categories below to some degree.

Research Implications

Reflective of the recent improvements in both the economy at large and IT spending specifically, the outlook for IT-related jobs in 2010 is positive. Even as vendors build more automation into their offerings in an attempt to minimize the human interaction required for management purposes, the fact is that qualified people will always be necessary to support the various processes that make technology solutions work. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that organizations with plans to increase their IT spending in 2010—whether it’s firms in healthier industries or leading-edge IT consumers—are also more likely to maintain or grow their IT headcount to ensure they maximize the return on their investments.

While short-term employment trends look relatively rosy, the flip side, of course, is the potential long-term impact that cloud computing services may have on IT staffing requirements.  For example, according to ESG’s data, 30% of respondents identifying SaaS (software-as-a-service) deployment as a key IT priority over the next 12-18 months expect to lose IT headcount this year, compared to only 12% of organizations with no interest in SaaS.  The key question, of course, is what is the causal relationship underlying this correlation?  Are organizations shedding IT jobs because a SaaS-based solution requires fewer administrators?  Or, does a SaaS-based solution offer an attractive, cost-effective alternative to a cash- and resource-constrained IT shop that just lost a significant number of workers?  Ultimately, the answer is probably that both forces are at work here.  ESG believes that the world of cloud computing is truly in its infancy and its real impact will not be truly felt or understood for a number of years.  That said, there is no doubt that the recent economic crisis has led more organizations to explore newer and potentially more cost-effective IT solutions (including cloud-based services) and may ultimately prove to be the catalyst that drives the initial investigation and usage of cloud services by a widespread segment of the IT market.

[2] For more detail on 2010 IT spending plans by industry, see the January 2010 ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey; and the January 2010 ESG Research Brief, 2010 Vertical Opportunity Index Score (VOIS) Rankings. ]]> http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/03/esg-research-brief-2010-it-staffing-trends/feed/ 0 http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/03/esg-research-brief-reference-research-storage-capacity-trends/ http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/03/esg-research-brief-reference-research-storage-capacity-trends/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:15:08 +0000 Garrett Doherty http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/?p=15031 ESG Reference Research includes data-centric reports and briefs designed for market intelligence, marketing, product marketing/management, engineering, and corporate strategy professionals at IT vendor organizations. ESG’s Reference Research content is designed to assist in market segmentation, market sizing, product requirements analysis, and other business planning exercises. This Reference Research brief focuses on 2010 disk storage system capacity trends among enterprise and midmarket organizations and includes analysis of storage capacity by number of employees, number of servers, and vertical industry.

Data Overview

Data presented in this brief was collected via a survey of 271 IT professionals with in-depth storage knowledge at North American and Western European enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) and midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) organizations.[1] Respondents were asked to provide their organization’s total installed capacity associated with external disk-based storage systems.  This data does not include storage capacity associated with servers, tape/optical libraries, or desktop/laptop/mobile devices.  Survey respondents’ total installed disk-based storage capacity is presented in Figure 1.  While a more detailed view of installed capacity by organization size (as measured by total employees) is provided in Figure 2 and Table 1, it is typically more useful to analyze storage capacity by an organization’s overall number of production servers, which is provided in Figure 3 and Table 2.  Disk capacity trends are also shown by industry in Figure 4.  Finally, Figure 5 illustrates ongoing storage growth by displaying the percent of organizations that now report 250 TB of capacity or more, compared to similar 2009 ESG data.

[2] Please note that in some cases, respondents at large organizations may only be responsible for storage infrastructure at a business unit, subsidiary, division, or department level.  In those cases, the amount of storage capacity reported may not be reflective of the organization’s total capacity. ]]> http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/03/esg-research-brief-reference-research-storage-capacity-trends/feed/ 0 http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/03/esg-research-brief-add-sharepoint-to-the-%e2%80%9carchive%e2%80%9d-list/ http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/03/esg-research-brief-add-sharepoint-to-the-%e2%80%9carchive%e2%80%9d-list/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:50:22 +0000 Garrett Doherty http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/?p=14634 Last year, ESG highlighted the importance of SharePoint as a business application and shared several statistics about its impact on IT infrastructures. The focal point is quickly turning to the importance of the information stored within SharePoint as well as the vast quantity of it. Those organizations that use SharePoint as a file share replacement are quickly finding that the scalability limitations of SQL Server mean that they have merely shifted the storage burden from one repository to another. In other instances, companies may be trying to limit SharePoint usage for business records. In either scenario, the files within SharePoint may be considered “in scope” of a regulatory audit or electronic discovery request. As a result of these trends, ESG believes that organizations will soon follow the precedent set by e-mail archiving a few years back and turn to archiving in order to consolidate data residing at disparate SharePoint farms in a central location, reducing storage costs and facilitating legal hold and electronic evidence collection.

Microsoft SharePoint Continues to Gain Market Traction

In a 2009 report, ESG revealed that one in three (33%) North American and Western European midmarket and enterprise companies were using Microsoft’s SharePoint suite of collaboration and content management tools, with an additional 13% indicating plans to implement the solution.[1] More recent data confirms that collaboration and content management solutions have become organization-wide, critical business resources.  As shown in Figure 1, more than more than one-third (35%) of IT organizations cite collaboration platforms and tools—most notably Microsoft SharePoint—as a key area of information management technology investment over the next 12-18 months. [2]

The increasing global adoption of—and importance attached to—Microsoft SharePoint reflects a number of current business realities driving a growing need for collaboration technologies. The ability to create a centralized file share across internal teams or company locations is one of SharePoint’s most compelling value propositions, a point confirmed by survey respondents. The ability to collaborate on a variety of file types—from business critical documents such as contracts and expense reports to productivity application documents like slide presentations—allows for better communication, effective workflows and processes, and more efficient management of time and resources.

The Focus Shifts to the Information

SharePoint may improve communication and collaboration within an organization, but it’s not without its own unique set of challenges.  IT departments must realize that while they have seemingly alleviated the file share storage burden, all content is now stored within a Microsoft SQL Server database.  This may sound like a great tradeoff, but many IT staffs would be very surprised to learn that Microsoft is quietly recommending a 100 GB limit on SharePoint SQL content databases.[3] One organization ESG interviewed was experiencing rapid SharePoint adoption and noted that the accompanying data growth didn’t impact storage scalability, but rather caused a SQL Server database management issue.  After a content database got to be roughly 50 GB, site performance slowed and backups were barely completing.  At the 100-150 GB range, the company had to start preparing a new SQL Server content database and then scheduled a content migration to load balance the data for performance and data protection reasons.  The company now has more than 50 SQL Server content databases in its SharePoint environment.  As SharePoint usage becomes more pervasive, increased data growth will be a given and IT will have find a more efficient way to deal with it.

A separate issue may arise regarding the quality, not the quantity, of data associated with SharePoint implementations.  Companies may be using SharePoint as a platform to support an application that manages invoices or insurance forms.  All or a portion of this content may be classified as vital business records, be subject to record retention regulations, or fall within the scope of an electronic discovery request. For compliance scenarios, content may need to be saved for a specific period of time while a document relevant to a specific electronic discovery request is subject to a legal hold in order to meet evidence preservation requirements.  The electronic discovery challenge is more likely to manifest itself in companies that have distributed SharePoint farms, which can make running searches across several databases (see above scenario) rather time consuming.

Archiving is the Logical Answer

These SharePoint challenges aren’t new by any means. Companies went through this—or are still going through it—with e-mail.  Archiving, as defined by ESG, is the long term retention of information in a non-production environment to satisfy compliance, electronic discovery, and business reference needs.   A separate environment is critical as it allows organizations to index (making search easy), assign retention policies, and cost effectively store content without impacting the associated production applications. In some cases, content is moved from the production environment to the archive while remaining accessible to users via the application. If done properly, the users never know the data was moved.   The benefit of this type of “migration” is that the production environment remains roughly the same size since it is constantly pruned by an archive process.

It is very obvious to see how archiving has the potential to benefit SharePoint environments in much the same way it has for e-mail.  In fact, according to the 2009 ESG report, it appears many organizations were preparing for this step during their initial deployments of SharePoint. Specifically, 47% of SharePoint users said that they were already archiving data associated with SharePoint and more than one-third (36%) planned to do so.  In terms of decision drivers, compliance, legal process improvements, and storage optimization were cited among the top five reasons organizations chose to archive their SharePoint data (see Figure 2).  Clearly, many organizations feel they are best served by archiving SharePoint content in order to ensure appropriate retention time and data immutability as well as search and retrieval.  In addition, with IT departments experiencing significant growth in the amount of SharePoint data being stored and backed up, there is extra incentive to remove older information in order to optimize storage utilization and expedite data protection operations.

Unfortunately, many organizations are “archiving” SharePoint with traditional backup processes, which means they are saving tapes for specific periods of time in order to satisfy compliance mandates or removing the tapes from a standard rotational process to prevent deletion and satisfy legal hold requirements.   In such situations, data is never moved out of the production environment, leaving IT departments to deal with the previously discussed SQL Server sizing and performance issues. The e-mail archive market followed a similar pattern at the outset of its introduction in which companies used backup processes to create an archive. However, not only did this fail to solve all the problems with which it was tasked, but, in some cases, it made the data inaccessible, making it hard to find when attorneys, compliance officers, or employees needed information quickly.  Companies quickly turned to purpose-built e-mail archive solutions which managed data in native format and enabled customers to store it on a media type of their choice, including disk systems.  ESG expects SharePoint archiving processes to follow the same learning curve, though more rapidly because the implications of an incomplete or poorly designed archiving strategy can be costly in terms of application performance, complex electronic discovery processes, and inconsistent records management practices.

Centralization without Disruption

Any company that has dealt with a SharePoint-specific SQL Server will quickly see the value in moving data out of the production environment without disrupting user access to that data.  When dealing with several SharePoint farms— some of which may be at remote offices—eliminating the need to constantly add new SQL Server databases simplifies operations.  In terms of compliance and electronic discovery, aggregating business records in a single archive removes the need to search across multiple SharePoint farms.  The archive becomes a repository of record and, depending on the archive solution that is implemented, SharePoint data can be combined with other archived content (e-mail, instant messages, files, etc.), further reducing the number of places attorneys and auditors need to go when responding to legal and regulatory inquiries.  A more recent ESG research study shows that 51% of organizations currently using a purpose-built e-mail archive solution are also retaining collaboration data, with an additional 29% planning to do so within the next year (see Figure 3).[4] This is an extraordinary number considering that the e-mail archive market is still maturing.

Research Implications

For many years, organizations resisted deploying a purpose-built e-mail archive, but the alternatives—buying more storage, hiring electronic discovery specialists, and satisfying compliance audits—became too expensive.  Currently, ESG research estimates that 35% of companies have deployed a purpose-built e-mail archive solution. SharePoint certainly has the potential to create the same number of challenges that e-mail does, if not more.  As such, ESG believes that the use of purpose-built SharePoint archive solutions will become more commonplace. Unlike with e-mail where organizations waited for a compelling event (big storage purchase, an overwhelming electronic discovery request, etc.), users have followed a more proactive investment curve for SharePoint archive solutions and will likely continue to do so as the platform becomes more ubiquitous within organizations and the market at large.

In the aforementioned 2009 report, nearly three-quarters (74%) of planned adopters said that SharePoint would be a top ten initiative for their organization over the next 24 months.  It is now relatively clear that the importance of SharePoint really centers on the quantity and quality of data the platform will manage.  Archiving is ideal to manage SharePoint information within this context—customers just need to decide how they are going to do it.  There are a variety of on-premises content archiving applications that now support SharePoint.  Customers could also choose a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution in which archived data is sent to and managed by a third party provider.  This particular option is extremely appealing because it means that customers do not have to deploy or run any of the archive infrastructure components (index servers, storage, etc.) since the provider handles it all.

Regardless of the deployment methodology, organizations have multiple SharePoint archive choices other than tape.   By going the purpose-built solution route, organizations can improve existing SharePoint implementations while streamlining IT, legal, and compliance processes.  These benefits will be a welcome relief for many as SharePoint’s role expands and the data stored quickly grows in terms of both capacity and value to the business.

[2] Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2010.

[3] Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335963.aspx

[4] Source: ESG Research, E-Mail Archiving Market Survey, November 2009.

Storage Spending to Increase in 2010

ESG’s 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey reveals good news for the storage industry in 2010.  First, 52% of midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations will increase general IT spending in 2010 as opposed to only 43% in 2009.[1] More importantly, specific spending on storage equipment also looks promising, as 54% of the organizations surveyed said they will increase their spending on storage hardware this year, up from just 38% in 2009 (see Figure 1).  Conversely—and just as significant to storage vendors—only 15% of organizations will decrease spending on storage hardware in 2010, compared to 25% of respondents in 2009.

IT Initiatives Driving 2010 Storage Spending

What specific IT initiatives are driving this planned increase in storage hardware spending?  For one, organizations with major 2010 initiatives involving new data center construction appear set to take that opportunity to refresh their storage infrastructure: 66% of these organizations will increase storage hardware spending in 2010 compared to 54% of ESG’s total respondent base (see Figure 2).  Other IT priorities driving above-average new storage hardware spending  in 2010 include desktop virtualization (66%), new business intelligence initiatives (65%), business continuity/disaster recovery programs (63%) and enterprise content management (ECM) projects (62%), to name but a few.

Storage Spending Outlook by Industry and Organizational Behavior

For storage vendors, solutions and marketing messages tied to the IT priorities above should find a receptive audience among 2010 IT buyers.  Storage vendors will also want to know more specifically where they should best focus their efforts and resources in 2010 from a vertical industry perspective.  As shown in Figure 3, health care, business services, financial services, and communications and media organizations are the most likely to have plans to increase storage hardware spending in 2010.  On the other hand, fewer than 50% of the organizations surveyed in other industries— which includes both federal and state/local government, education, and transportation and logistics—expect to see budget increases for storage hardware this year.  It is worth noting, however, that organizations in the federal government and transportation and logistics industries are very much maintaining storage spending and were least likely to actually foresee spending cuts in 2010.

Changes in an organization’s overall 2010 IT spending profile compared to 2009 can also serve as a key indicator of  storage hardware purchasing plans. As shown in Table 1, those organizations that are still focused primarily on cutting IT costs are unlikely to increase storage hardware spending while those in “growth mode” will be far more active buyers.

ESG also analyzed storage hardware purchasing plans by company psychographic profiles and found a number of interesting trends.  Most significantly, the manner in which an organization typically purchases IT products and services is a strong predictor of increased storage hardware spending.  Respondents that classify their organizations as “leading-edge” consumers of IT products and services are far more likely to have plans for increased storage hardware spending in 2010 than are those with more conservative IT purchasing habits (see Table 2).

Which Storage Products Will Sell in 2010?

2010 storage spending corresponds to organizations’ ongoing need to manage explosive data growth, which was identified by ESG’s survey respondents as a top-five IT priority over the next 12-18 months. Indications of new raw storage system purchases—whether SAN (31%) or NAS (22%)—might well indicate that equipment purchases postponed in 2009 return to the top of the priority list as solutions in organizations struggling with that data growth and its associated management challenges (see Figure 4).  Other top storage solutions for 2010 include data replication, storage virtualization, more power-efficient hardware, and data reduction technologies.

2010 storage investments by company size: When analyzed by company size, ESG’s data reveals that enterprise organizations are more likely than their midmarket counterparts to have 2010 plans for initiatives such as tiered storage, new SAN system purchase, data replication, and storage encryption (see Figure 5).  For their part, midmarket organizations are slightly more likely than larger organizations to have plans for NAS-based systems, tape replacement, and storage management tools.

2010 storage investments by industry: The top five specific storage-related 2010 priorities by industry are displayed in Table 3.  Among the key findings:

• Major verticals such as health care and federal government are in lockstep with respect to four out of five of their top storage priorities: data replication, new SAN purchases, new NAS purchases, and storage encryption.
• Financial and business services both cite data reduction as their top storage solution priority for 2010.
• Communications and media firms also look to data reduction—and new NAS systems—to help control and manage ever-increasing stores of file-based content.

2010 storage investments by top business initiatives: Shifting away from industry-specific storage trends, ESG has also examined planned 2010 storage investments as they pertain to respondents’ specific business initiatives.  The most noticeable ‘take-away’ from this analysis is that “green” has re-emerged as a key driver for storage spending; perhaps this is a response to a rebounding economy; potentially, it is also a renewed semantic acceptability for a term that has been subsumed during the downturn into the more ‘austerity-acceptable’ terminology of ‘efficiency.’ Whatever the motivation, the adoption of certain storage technologies—including SRM software, flash-based SSDs, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)—can be significantly identified as key areas of 2010 investment by organizations that cite “green initiatives” as having a significant impact on their IT spending decisions over the next 12-18 months (see Table 4).

The Bigger Truth

The preceding data can help storage vendors by identifying high-probability target buyers—whether by company size, industry, IT priorities, and/or business initiatives that are underway.  The psychographic data presented can also be used to separate strong from weak prospects.  Smart companies will sort through their leads and use ESG’s data as the basis for a set of qualifying questions.  For example, telemarketing staff could call prospects and ask them:

1. “Is your organization in IT cost containment or growth mode?”  Growth mode prospects should be highlighted as they are probably increasing their storage hardware spending.
2. “Would you consider your organization to be a ‘leading edge’ IT consumer?”  If yes, this prospect probably has significant storage purchasing plans for 2010.
3. “Does your organization have 2010 IT initiatives in the areas of virtualization (server and desktop), data center construction/consolidation, improved business intelligence, business continuity/disaster recovery, or enterprise content management?”  All prospects answering yes to any of these are likely to have significant storage hardware spending plans.
4. “Does your organization have significant green businesses initiatives underway?” Such organizations are more likely to be interested in power efficiency, better storage management, solid state and converged networking.

Beyond such qualification exercises, ESG’s data can also underpin the blueprints for vendors’ vertical industry sales and marketing strategies; this is because the data not only indicates which industries are buying storage systems, software, and networking, but also the specific technologies that they plan to purchase. Table 5 takes the insights from ESG’s Spending Intentions research and provides a general, actionable guide—by industry—that can help storage providers fine tune the optimum application of their marketing budgets. It does this by providing guidance for marketing messages and plans in industry-appropriate directions, which can in turn help to steer accurately focused investments in marketing programs and sales tactics.