ILM still has a long way to go, analyst warns
Information Lifecycle Management not yet an accepted business tool
Despite Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) being touted as the next big thing, one analyst firm has claimed the technology has a long way to go before becoming an accepted business tool.
In his report Information Lifecycle Management: Destined for a bumpy ride, Graham Titterington, senior analyst at Ovum, said that although most of the big storage vendors have jumped on the bandwagon, significant problems remain with the technology.
He said: "Management of information requires competence in both content management and storage, [and] content management is used only selectively."
Integration hurdles are also being underestimated, Titterington added. "Today we only see the first step on the road to integration and the steps we see could turn out to be on a dead-end road," he said.
Hamish Macarthur, chief executive of analyst MacArthur Stroud, said: "ILM is key to companies identifying the data they need to maintain.
"One of the challenges lies in the fact that the digital mindset has not been encompassing this holistically."
Mark Maby, ILM campaign manager at StorageTek, said he is seeing customers implementing hierarchical data management, which is very similar to ILM.
But Maby admitted that the channel still has some way to go. "Resellers are concerned with the day-to-day task of getting revenue and many don't have the right consultancy skills," he said.
Adrian Burch, business development manager at storage specialist TriSys, agreed. "Resellers are getting into ILM but don't have the tools or consultancy skills to implement it properly," he said.