Rich Castagna, Editorial Director
Storage managers may finally be seeing a light at the end of the economic tunnel or, as the old joke goes, maybe it's an oncoming train. But after a train wreck of an economy, it looks like storage budgets may be creeping back to something resembling normalcy. Of course, "normalcy" is a relative term, as those budgets are still hovering in negative territory.
Last spring when the full impact of the recession was starting to sink in, storage managers were feeling the same sting that hobbled virtually every business. In that earlier edition of our Storage Purchasing Intentions survey, data storage managers reported that their 2009 storage budgets were likely to be 1.9% less than 2008's. While that might not seem like a huge dip, it did represent a nearly five point drop from what they reported in the fall of 2008. And it was the first time in seven years that we saw a negative number when we asked storage managers to compare their budgets year over year. In our most recent survey, conducted in early September, the picture is a little brighter. Compared with 2008, storage budgets are a mere 0.4% lower -- not back into positive numbers, but certainly more encouraging than six months ago. Overall, 30% of those surveyed reported decreased budgets, 28% said their budgets would remain flat and almost 33% said their budgets increased.
Read the rest of this story to get the lowdown on customer purchasing plans in a number of product areas, based on research from Storage magazine's Purchasing Intentions survey of 826 storage buyers.
