UK companies wasting £1bn on storage

A survey conducted by NOP, commissioned by Compaq, found that almost half of the companies questioned are inefficiently storing data while another 26 per cent have no data management policies in place. Consequently Donal Madden, storage business manager at Compaq, believes UK companies will waste between £700m and £1bn this year alone.

Other key findings were that 47 per cent of the respondents did not spend any of their IT budget on storage last year, and that the management of the storage is still firmly in the realm of the IT department rather than the board or the marketing department.

However, Wayne Rickard, chairman of technical council, SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association), was critical of storage vendors for creating too much hype and so confusing the consumer.

He said: "The user community needs to understand better what the upside [of storage] is for them. That is something that SNIA is going to address but it is also up to the vendors themselves - less hype and more education would be great."

Don Hawkins, analyst at Datamonitor, believes the key lies in the tools IT departments use to analyse the data. The European market for analytical CRM products is predicted to grow from £563m in 1999 to £2.1bn by 2004. "All information is useless unless you use the analyst tools to push the trends they throw up through to the sales and marketing departments."

However, Hawkins admitted the analysis and storage of data is not essential for all vertical markets because some industries have less "competitive pressure".