The Magic Quadrant on SSA’s
Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. A vendor in the Leaders quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. These vendors demonstrate a clear understanding of market needs; they are innovators and thought leaders; and they have well-articulated plans that customers and prospects can use when designing their storage infrastructures and strategies. In addition, they have a presence in the five major geographical regions, consistent financial performance and broad platform support.
Challengers
Vendors in the Challengers quadrant participates in the SSA market and executes well enough to be a serious threat to vendors in the Leaders quadrant. They have strong products, as well as sufficient credible market position and resources to sustain continued growth. Financial viability is not an issue for vendors in the Challengers quadrant, but they lack the size and influence of vendors in the Leaders quadrant.
Visionaries
A vendor in the Visionaries quadrant delivers innovative products that address operationally or financially important end-user problems at a broad scale, but has not demonstrated the ability to capture market share or sustainable profitability. Visionary vendors are frequently privately held companies and acquisition targets for larger, established companies. The likelihood of acquisition often reduces the risks associated with installing their systems.
Niche Players
Vendors in the Niche Players quadrant often excel by focusing on specific market or vertical segments that are generally underpenetrated by the larger SSA vendors. This quadrant may also include vendors that are ramping up their SSA efforts, or larger vendors having difficulty in developing and executing upon their vision.
Between 2010 and 2012, most customers were interested primarily in high-performance and low-latency SSAs. Given the lack of available data management features, customers tolerated the feature shortcomings in favour of raw performance. As initial storage performance issues were capably addressed, customers wanted to address multiple application workloads that required a rich data management software portfolio consisting not only of storage efficiency and resiliency technologies purpose-built for SSAs, but also the underlying SSD memory technology. During 2013, we witnessed the advent of comprehensive data management software features, such as de-duplication, compression, thin provisioning, snapshots and replication technologies that, when specifically tailored to SSD, can provide compelling benefits, particularly in application workloads that see favorable data reduction ratios. This trend of innovative and comprehensive data management software on the more mature SSA platforms has continued into 2014, and has started to permeate at the application level, which will drive the industry in 2015 and beyond. It is through the synergy of cost-effective hardware and purpose-built software that the industry will see further consolidation in order to reach maturation.