Storage Adviser | Mario Apicella » Betting on the future of storage

October 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Betting on the future of storage

TAGS: Protocols and Technologies

Predictive market isn't exactly a new technology, but as far as I can tell, it was never applied to the storage industry -- until now.

What's predictive market? It's a market research tool that employs the stock market metaphor -- securities, traders, and shares -- to prognosticate the future outcome of an idea. Traders who register with a predictive market are assigned a certain amount of virtual money to finance their transactions, usually at no charge for them.

It works like this: If you like an idea, you buy its shares just as you would do with actual securities. Obviously, if many people buy shares of the same idea the price will go up, which tells an observer that the idea has some merit. Put two competing ideas on the market, and traders will soon decide which one is the winner.

Take a quick peek at Wikipedia and you'll see that the technology has been used with some success in a variety of situations, such as predicting the outcome of presidential elections, Oscar nominations, and sporting events.

Could the predictive market approach be useful to storage? John Ives, president and co-founder of Storage Markets , and Vice President and co-founder Rich Pappas have no doubts.

"This is really a tough industry," Pappas points out. "If I am a semiconductor company, today I am making funding decisions that [will] impact my product line up to three or four years from now."

To help support those decisions, Ives and Pappas founded Storage Markets and collected a group of traders with diversified expertise in storage. Here is a chart of the current traders demographics by type of company, but that might change as more traders join.

Vendors are obviously the primary customers of Storage Markets' services, and will provide questions that traders will answer with their transactions. Here is an example of how a question about two disk drives models reaching the same price could be answered.

As an honorary trader, I can testify that Storage Markets is fun and addictive, which should motivate more people with storage expertise to join and keep the transactions going. The company is not discussing prices, but their services should be competitive with alternative market research options, according to Pappas.

End users may have something to gain from all this, too: If vendors save money by basing their decisions on more accurate market predictions, that should translate into less expensive goods.

Am I being too optimistic? If you have storage expertise, try becoming a trader at Storage Markets and start betting on the future of storage.

Posted by Mario Apicella on October 30, 2006 05:40 AM

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