Thursday 29 July 2010
Founded in 2000, IBrix, in Billerica, Mass., has 53 employees and more than 175 corporate customers spanning the communications, media, entertainment, Internet, oil and gas, healthcare, life sciences and financial services industries. HP uses the company’s technology in several products, including StorageWorks storage area networks, ProLiant servers, BladeSystems and ProCurve Ethernet switches and management software. IBrix provides HP with another piece of technology to grab a slice of the growing cloud-computing market. The computing architecture provides dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. Examples include Salesforce.com’s software-as-a-service offering, and Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service business.
Cloud computing involves massive scale-out of servers, which present challenges in software development, deployment, management, security and more. IBrix’s key product Fusion includes a “highly scalable parallel file system with data protection, high availability features and a comprehensive management interface,” according to IBrix. The technology can handle data-intensive application environments involving 10s of petabytes of data. HP did not disclose financial details. The deal is expected to be completed within 30 days. HP plans to integrate IBrix into the StorageWorks division of HP’s Technology Solutions Group. HP announced the agreement about a week after storage rival EMC agreed to buy Data Domain, a maker of technology that reduces the amount of duplicated data stored. EMC agreed to pay $2.4 billion for the deduplication specialist.
First, the good news: 2009 isn’t going to be like 2002. Corporate customers are not going to completely re-evaluate the role information technology plays in their business, as they did in the aftermath of the tech bubble. There will be no searing crisis of confidence. But there is going to be less money going around, and, to some extent, that’s going to hit nearly every tech-related sector. “Clearly, it is going to be more than a mild, one-quarter phenomenon,” says Vito Mabrucco, Toronto-based senior vice-president of IDC’s worldwide consulting practice.
IDC’s survey of Canadian corporate IT decision makers found 81% of respondents believe their spending will be lower in 2009. The approach most companies will take, however, will be to slow down or draw projects out over six to 12 months. “There is still optimism and an expectation, especially in Canada, that we will come out of this within a year,” says Mabrucco. “In IT terms, that’s not a long time. If they stop major projects completely, then a year from now, they’re going to have a hard time starting that up again.”
How bad will it get? IDC recently ratcheted down its growth forecast for Canadian IT spending in 2009 to 1.7% from 4%. (It predicted 3.4% growth for 2008). In the U.S., growth will be just 0.9%. Globally, worldwide IT spending will be up 2.6% in 2009, according to IDC (but not 5.9%, as it predicted in August), while rival firm Gartner Inc. expects, at worst, 2.3% growth. But even emerging technologies, like those characterized as Web 2.0 or cloud computing, will continue to find a market, in part because they don’t cost much upfront. In fact, the idea of paying for computing as it is used will be attractive.Security and networking technologies will suffer less, as will large-scale software systems that are seen to offer big operational advantages. Likewise, the strong demand for storage will not abate. However, growth will slow more sharply in mobile devices, as companies delay rollouts. In services like IT consulting and systems integration, spending will be flat, as fewer big projects go ahead in 2009.
As events in 2008 made clear, though, even grim forecasts can be too optimistic. Pick a calamity—large-scale bankruptcies in the auto industry or a major terrorist attack—and then what? IDC says IT spending in Canada would shrink 0.6%. Doesn’t sound like much, but IT spending has contracted only once before here—in 2002. And it would take some really bad news for that to happen. It forecasts revenues at Canadian tech manufacturers will decline 0.2%, with employment down 2%. In computer services, price-adjusted sales will rise 2%, the weakest pace since 1996.
