IDC's Pricing Evaluation Service: Storage product provides storage and system vendors with intelligence and analysis to create winning price and product positioning strategies. With pricing, specification, and configuration information at its foundation, the product expands into the intrinsic factors that represent the "art of a storage deal." Through IDC's Pricing eValuator Web site, clients can access real-time pricing, promotions, and specifications for select storage topic areas - disk systems, hard drives, autoloaders, tape libraries, tape drives, optical and tape media, SAN infrastructure, and storage software - or may opt for a compilation of all topic areas.

This product covers the following segments of the storage market:

• Enterprise storage arrays
• Network-attached storage (NAS)
• Midrange disk arrays
• Entry disk arrays
• Services
• Content archive systems
• Software (management and platform)
• Directors/switches
• Tape libraries
• Virtual tape systems

Throughout the year, this product will address the following topics:

• Impact of pricing on emerging distribution channels
• Declining reseller and vendor margins
• Opportunities in a maturing market
• Winners and losers in the protracted price war
• Multiple sources of components fueling a supplier price war
• Vendor pricing profiles
• Emerging pricing trends in corporate procurement

Our research addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. What are the critical factors, such as software and vendor sales practices, that determine how end-user pricing is set for enterprise storage?
2. Which vendors initiate/dominate price positioning in this marketplace?
3. Given its complexity, what is an accurate and true comparison of pricing in enterprise storage?
4. What are key vendor strategies for determining price position? How can vendors maximize their own price position?

IDC's Pricing Evaluation Service: Storage product analyzes the product strategies, competitive positioning, financial viability, and overall strategic direction of major providers in the storage market. Companies tracked include:

3PAR, Brocade, CA, Cisco, Dell, EMC, EqualLogic, FalconStor, HDS, HP, IBM, McDATA, NetApp, Overland Storage, Pillar Data, QLogic, Quantum, Seagate/Maxtor, Sun/StorageTek, Symantec/VERITAS, and Xiotech.

Internet access to data and analysis tools is provided via IDC's Pricing eValuator Web site. The tools and services available to clients include the following:

• Price and specifications database includes list-, street-, eretailer-, Web-, and distributor-level pricing as well as specifications, historical pricing, and product availability information.
• Easy-to-use configuration builder and product comparison tools are available.
• Configure-to-order pricing database captures pricing for each feature of every configuration that a vendor presents on its configure-to-order Web site. For example, a vendor might have more than 5,000 individual features that can be built into unique system configurations. This database reports any change to an individual feature, such as a charge for incremental memory, and its impact on the price of an overall configuration.
• Market monitor provides continuous analysis of the pricing marketplace by integrating real-time pricing with written spot analysis.
• IDC updates detail price and promotion changes and new product announcements as they happen, emphasizing fast delivery of pricing data so clients can react rapidly.
• Custom consulting is available for special projects.

As a privately held company, IDC believes that our customers are our primary constituency. A large percentage of every revenue dollar is reinvested back into our products, including more analysts, more geographic coverage, and extensive primary research.

Our steady growth over the past 10-plus years reflects our commitment to investing in our customers.