Insert another coin to continue
He said customers were pulling Quantum along: "They're actually shifting the risk to the vendor. … They are moving away from tape and moving to disk and the cloud and we're riding that wave."
To some extent disk, sure. To cloud, unlikely. Perhaps that may be the case for limited number of SMEs, but any larger enterprise would have issues with the quantity of data (and thus requirement and cost of the connectivity should they consider cloud). Sensitivity is another issue. Companies tend to be quite protective of business sensitive/critical data.
Of course selling service is better for the vendor as it offers continual revenue stream not dependent on hardware upgrade cycles...