The real battle for the future of the storage market will be between Tier 1 incumbents and hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Drive) that have novel business models, address new customers, and take new cost structures into account. For this reason, they are the true industry disruptors and the ones most likely to succeed in an era of transformation.
The storage industry is in the midst of a major transformation that will forever change its economics. Lower cost, higher performance, on-premise storage and nearly free cloud-based storage are driving both innovation and disruption in the industry.