Captive Data Centers

Yesterday, I attended a product launch and seminar from Hitachi Data Systems. The conference was discussing case studies with a focus on Service Oriented Storage Solutions from HDS. The seminar was well organised and the speakers were from HDS and HDS user community. I wondered how would organizations take a positive decision on the capital expenditure despite there is an urgency to bring down operational expenditure. HDS storage solutions leverages the virtualization technologies for better managing existing data centers, and you have to buy boxes and racks invariably. Rather than ROI , the sales pitch was on ROA. Interestingly HDS business in India has beaten the overall market performance of its competitors in the year 2008.

What would be the future for box-bound service-oriented solutions in the short-run and long-run?  HDS can help in building a captive data center, and do a good short-term business. When 'Hardware as a service' is slowly becoming the customer expectation globally, I believe the long-run for this kind of businesses would be tough.