IDC's Product Evaluation Service: StoragePES is utilized widely by internal competitive intelligence, marketing, sales support, and field sales teams. StoragePES provides storage vendors with the intelligence and analysis to create winning price and product positioning strategies. StoragePES expands into the intrinsic factors that represent the "art of a storage deal," with pricing for storage product components, storage software, service, and configurations. It includes in-depth technical specifications and a wide range of application tools like the custom configurator or quick compare.

This service covers, at a tactical level, the following product categories within the storage market:

• NAS — enterprise, midrange, and entry level
• SAN — enterprise, midrange, and entry level
• DAS — enterprise, midrange, and entry level
• Switch, routers, and directors
• Software (management and platform)
• Tape automation
• Virtual tape systems
• Storage services

This service will address the following topics:

• Comparison of product features and functions
• Comparison of standard storage configurations across multiple vendors
• Detailed technical product information
• Pricing list, channel, maintenance, international
• Real deal transaction information
• Pricing history
• Services profiles and comparisons

StoragePES addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. How does our storage product stack up against the competitor's product technically?
2. Given the market complexity, what is an accurate and true comparison of storage configurations and pricing?
3. What are a vendor's discounting methodologies? Provide examples of discounting percentages for storage configurations.
4. Which vendors initiate/dominate price positioning in this marketplace?

IDC's Product Evaluation Service: StoragePES product examines how storage vendors have positioned themselves to compete in the storage market. The following is a list of the storage vendors tracked in this service. Pricing information for the United States and some EMEA and Asia/Pacific countries is available:

BlueArc, Brocade, Cisco, Data Domain/EMC, Dell/Compellent, Dell/EqualLogic, EMC, EMC/Isilon, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle/Pillar Data Systems, Oracle/Sun, Overland Storage, Quantum, and XioTech.

Licensed as a 12-month service, StoragePES is delivered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through the Internet.

Support, both application and analyst, will be made available 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST.