Who Will Be Storage Leaders of 2016? | @CloudExpo #Cloud #SDN #Linux

A year ago, I wrote a two-part series on how lower cost, higher performance on-premise storage and nearly free cloud based storage were driving both innovation and disruption in the storage industry. Applying Clayton Christensen's theory of innovation and disruption to the storage industry, my premise was that flashy startups, (e.g. Pure, Nimble, VMem, Tegile and Tintri) that were first to introduce credible data reduction to flash arrays were innovators but not disruptors in the space and would therefore disappoint investors; storage incumbents (e.g. HDS, EMC and IBM) who added data reduction would continue to survive; but the real disruptors would be the cloud players (e.g., Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The combination of struggling share prices, weak earnings reports, recent acquisitions, and raging cloud revenue witnessed throughout 2015 and into 2016 continue to point to Christensen's theory as the explanation for an ongoing economic transformation that will forever change the storage industry as we know it.

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