It depends! =) Keep in mind that revenue and profit is not the same thing, and that it is easier to massively grow your customer base when you're small. However, the new guys do have some cool stuff!
So what do I think? I think the going will get tough in the smb space. When you talk about the enterprise space, it is always nice to have a multi-billion dollar company to choke. On a massive scale, it's also nice to buy from one vendor, to avoid islands of specific purpose built solutions from many vendors.
Even though the individual storage systems are cheap, once you start to add together the operations and support and training for one VDI stack from company 1, an object store from company 2, and enterprise array for enterprise application from company 3, and a AFA for a demanding data base from company 4, the TCO starts to point in favor of the giant, that does _not_ have the best systems, but good enough systems.
Looking forward to more of these articles!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
