Symantec plays one-armed ROI bandit

Claims firms could save 10 to 15 percent of their storage management costs with new offering

Symantec claims IT departments can shave up to fifteen per cent off their storage budgets using its unified storage management solutions. But the vendor offered little to suggest that it can deliver on the promises made at its Vision 2007 user conference, held in the world’s gambling capital of Las Vegas.

Calculating return on investment (ROI) prior to real time deployment is always a risk business, but Symantec recently completed a program involving over a hundred customers that sought to predict how much money they could save by moving to its newly announced Storage United initiative.

“The results are dramatic – 10 to 15 per cent of total storage budget can be saved, up to $168m over a three year period, depending on the scale of the architecture,” said Kris Hagermann, Symantec group president of data centre management.

Hagermann admitted that the primary areas for cost savings were typical. Migrating data to lower, less expensive tiers of storage and having less redundant storage and server software were high on the list, both concepts already well understood and widely implemented by enterprise IT departments.

In his keynote address, Symantec chief executive John W. Thompson lamented the fact that most people still think of Symantec as a security company, and rarely consider what else it offers.

“People do not recognise the full breadth of our product portfolio, but Symantec is very proud of its storage solutions,” he said.