best practices award template - frost & sullivan … · ibm cloud object storage is a flexible,...

FROST & SULLIVAN BEST PRACTICES AWARD

Product Line Strategy Leadership Award 2019

CLOUD OBJECT STORAGE - GLOBAL

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© Frost & Sullivan 2019 2 “We Accelerate Growth”

Contents Background and Company Performance ........................................................................ 3

Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 3

Product Line Strength and Customer Impact ............................................................ 4

Conclusion........................................................................................................... 6

Significance of Product Line Strategy ............................................................................ 7

Understanding Product Line Strategy Leadership ............................................................ 7

Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 8

Best Practices Award Analysis ...................................................................................... 8

Decision Support Scorecard ................................................................................... 8

Product Line Strength ........................................................................................... 9

Customer Impact ................................................................................................. 9

Decision Support Matrix ...................................................................................... 10

Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices ................................................................................................................. 11

The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 12

Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 12

About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 12



Background and Company Performance

Industry Challenges

Enterprises are increasingly betting their futures on data. According to an independent 2018 Frost & Sullivan survey, 77% of IT decision-makers believe that “data-driven decisions are better than decisions based on intuition.” Seventy-four percent say that “to compete effectively, every organization will need big data technologies and more advanced analytics.”

As a result, organizations are collecting, integrating, managing, analyzing, and storing increasingly large volumes of data.

Yet “big data” brings with it two basic problems: where to put it all (without spending too much) and how to access it when needed (without affecting app performance). Not surprisingly, storage growth has become a top challenge for businesses. In fact, nearly half of respondents to Frost & Sullivan’s 2018 Cloud User Survey cite “managing data and storage growth” as a top IT challenge hindering their companies’ digital transformation.

Storage challenges comprise many interrelated aspects, including:

• Capacity: Where and how to store large quantities of data?

• Accessibility: How to ensure that applications and users can access the data they need, when they need it?

• Velocity: How to ingest the deluge in real-time?

• Variety: How to combine structured, unstructured, and semi-structured content into a single data pool?

• Speed: How to ensure that applications and users have rapid access to the data they need?

• Availability: How to ensure data is always available to multiple apps and users that are geographically-dispersed?

• Management: How to minimize operational and management effort?

• Cost: How to minimize capital and operating costs?



While public cloud storage offers many benefits (including easy scalability and reasonable cost), not all data sets are suitable for the public cloud. Reasons for retaining certain data sets on-premises include:

• Data sovereignty regulations that require certain personal or business data to remain within a country’s borders

• Latency-intolerant applications, such as fire warning systems or many Internet of Things configurations that cannot handle network-induced delay

• Data “gravity” or the difficulty of moving large volumes of legacy data from the premises to the cloud.

Furthermore, as they undergo digital transformation, businesses are shifting from point solutions, in which data sets are architected for a particular application, to a broader use of aggregated data assets by multiple users and applications. This requires flexible storage solutions that can operate on premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration - without compromising data integrity, availability, or performance.

Product Line Strength and Customer Impact

IBM Cloud Object Storage is a flexible, software-defined storage platform that can be deployed on premises or in the IBM cloud. Enhanced by the recent launch of the company’s “IBM Cloud Object Storage Gen2” premises-based storage systems, IBM offers the most comprehensive object storage platform in the market.

Breadth of Product Line

IBM Cloud Object Storage is available to enterprises as a premises-based appliance, as well as a cloud service. This enables businesses of any size to implement a comprehensive storage strategy that meets the unique requirements for varying workloads and data sets.

The on-premises solution, IBM Cloud Object Storage Gen2, supports cloud-native scale-out storage. Unlike other competitors, Frost & Sullivan appreciates how IBM Cloud Object Storage has a low entry point – with just three nodes delivering 144 TB of capacity. This makes the solution quite attractive and cost-effective for smaller businesses, branch offices, or companies that want to try out the solution before making a significant investment.

As a cloud service, IBM Cloud Object Storage offers tiered storage classes, allowing customers to optimize cost-performance. Businesses can choose among three tiers: Standard (for active data); Vault (for less-frequently accessed data); and Cold Vault (for data accessed just a few times per year); as well as an archive option. IBM was also the first among leading cloud storage providers to introduce a “Flex” storage class for dynamic



or unpredictable needs, with a “price cap” – a maximum charge for combined storage and retrieval per GB of data. The price cap feature allows customers to predict storage costs more accurately - and helps them to attain the lowest possible pricing.

Scalability

IBM Cloud Object Storage is designed to be fully scalable, without limiting application performance. The company says its new Gen2 nodes can scale out to multi-petabyte and Exabyte capacity. The high-density nodes enable greater raw capacity per rack (10.2PB) than earlier Gen1 nodes, at a lower cost per GB.

The IBM Cloud Object Storage platform enables flexible hybrid configurations. Customers can scale out their data stores across multiple data centers (private or cloud), to support needs such as global access, file synchronization, backup and archive, and more.

Technology Leverage

The IBM Cloud Object Storage platform has its genesis in the company’s 2015 acquisition of Cleversafe. The company has since improved on Cleversafe’s patented object storage technology, delivering a platform that is unmatched in functionality and sophistication. IBM Cloud Object Storage utilizes distributed architecture and information dispersal technology to maintain high levels of security, data availability, and data integrity. The technology distributes “slices” of encrypted user data across multiple nodes and data centers. No complete copy of the data exists in any single storage node (thus minimizing the value of data, should an unauthorized user access it). Because the full dataset can be recreated from a subset of the storage nodes, user data is protected even in the event of a data center outage. This creates a high-resiliency, high-availability environment with as few as 3 regional cloud centers or private data center, unlike other competitors who require the customer to create (and pay for) multiple redundant copies of the data to achieve resiliency.

Customer Price-Performance Value

IBM offers attractive price-performance value for all deployment models (on-premises, cloud, and hybrid), nicely enabling customers to choose the optimal capacity and configuration for each workload. The highly efficient on-premises appliances allow customers to select and pay for just the capacity they need. The new Accesser device optimizes storage, resulting in increased storage performance without adding capacity.

Frost & Sullivan notes that the cloud-based deployment model also offers superior price-performance, compared with other competitors. IBM’s per-GB pricing levels may be comparable to other leading cloud service providers; however, the Flex tier enables users to gain added value from their less-frequently accessed data - without adding to costs. Furthermore, IBM offers the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid object storage solution, supporting seamless movement of data between premises and cloud. By selecting the



optimal deployment option for each data set and application, enterprises minimizing storage costs and maximize performance.

Customer Ownership Experience

IBM Cloud Object Storage is designed to simplify the storage challenges posed by the era of Big Data. The solution’s flexibility and simplicity allows customers to quickly deploy and scale their storage, on premises or in the cloud. The platform supports automatic failover, data rebuild and management, and encryption via IBM or customer keys. It also enables integration with other IBM and third-party solutions, via APIs.

The flexible options also allow users to grow their storage at their own pace. On premises, customers can intermix older Gen1 and new Gen2 storage nodes, Accesser devices, and the system manager in a single system, thus protecting investments without requiring migration to a next-generation model.

Unlike other cloud providers, IBM offers its customers 24x7 access to IBM technical resources at no additional charge.

Conclusion

As businesses process and analyze ever-increasing volumes of data, they require storage that is flexible, scalable, secure, simple, and cost-efficient. IBM’s cloud object storage product line – comprising a sophisticated software-defined storage platform, a range of flexible appliances for on-premises deployments, and a high-value cloud service – is unmatched in the industry. For businesses looking to deploy a hybrid storage environment, today or in the future, IBM’s solution will support their needs.

With its strong overall performance, IBM has earned the 2019 Frost & Sullivan Global Product Line Strategy Leadership Award.



Significance of Product Line Strategy Ultimately, growth in any organization depends on customers purchasing from a company and then making the decision to return time and again. A full, comprehensive product line that addresses numerous customer needs and preferences is, therefore, critical to a company’s long-term retention efforts. To achieve the dual goals of customer value and product line strength, an organization must be best in class in 3 key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition.

Understanding Product Line Strategy Leadership Driving demand, strengthening brand, and differentiating from the competition all play critical roles in delivering unique value to customers. This three-fold focus, however, must ideally be complemented by an equally rigorous focus on building a superior and comprehensive product line.



Key Benchmarking Criteria For the Global Product Line Strategy Leadership Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently evaluated Product Line Strength and Customer Impact according to the criteria identified below.

Product Line Strength Criterion 1: Breadth Criterion 2: Scalability Criterion 3: Technology Leverage Criterion 4: Features Criterion 5: Supply Chain Reliability

Customer Impact Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Best Practices Award Analysis for IBM Decision Support Scorecard To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool allows research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance according to the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation. Ratings guidelines are illustrated below.

RATINGS GUIDELINES

The Decision Support Scorecard considers Product Line Strength and Customer Impact (i.e., the overarching categories for all 10 benchmarking criteria; the definitions for each criterion are provided beneath the scorecard). The research team confirms the veracity of this weighted scorecard through sensitivity analysis, which confirms that small changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the overall relative rankings of the companies.



The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the interests of all organizations reviewed, Frost & Sullivan has chosen to refer to the other key participants as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3.

Measurement of 1–10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent)

Product Line Strategy Product Line Strength

Customer Impact Average Rating

IBM 10.0 10.0 10.00

Competitor 2 6.0 8.0 7.00

Competitor 3 5.0 6.0 5.75

Product Line Strength Criterion 1: Breadth Requirement: Product line addresses the full range of customer needs and applications.

Criterion 2: Scalability Requirement: Product line offers products at a variety of price points and functionality levels.

Criterion 3: Technology Leverage Requirement: Demonstrated commitment to incorporating leading-edge technologies into product offerings results in greater product performance and value.

Criterion 4: Features Requirement: Products offer a comprehensive suite of features to serve customers at multiple levels of functionality, ease of use, and applications.

Criterion 5: Supply Chain Reliability Requirement: There is sufficient control over the supply chain to ensure availability of products and components.

Customer Impact Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar offerings in the market.

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience Requirement: Customers feel they are buying the optimal solution that addresses both their unique needs and their unique constraints.

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service and have a positive experience throughout the life of the product or service.



Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality.

Criterion 5: Brand Equity Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty.

Decision Support Matrix Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard, analysts then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at best-in-class levels.

High

Low

Low High

Cu

sto

mer

Im

pac

t

Product Line Strength

IBM

Competitor 2

Competitor 3



Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices Frost & Sullivan analysts follow a 10-step process to evaluate Award candidates and assess their fit with select best practices criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are based on close adherence to this process.

STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT

1 Monitor, target, and screen

Identify Award recipient candidates from around the world

• Conduct in-depth industry research

• Identify emerging industries • Scan multiple regions

Pipeline of candidates that potentially meet all best practices criteria

2 Perform 360-degree research

Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline

• Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners

• Assess candidates’ fit with best practices criteria

• Rank all candidates

Matrix positioning of all candidates’ performance relative to one another

3

Invite thought leadership in best practices

Perform in-depth examination of all candidates

• Confirm best practices criteria

• Examine eligibility of all candidates

• Identify any information gaps

Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates

4 Initiate research director review

Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles

• Brainstorm ranking options • Invite multiple perspectives

on candidates’ performance • Update candidate profiles

Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best practices positioning paper

5 Assemble panel of industry experts

Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders

• Share findings • Strengthen cases for

candidate eligibility • Prioritize candidates

Refined list of prioritized Award candidates

6 Conduct global industry review

Build consensus on Award candidates’ eligibility

• Hold global team meeting to review all candidates

• Pressure-test fit with criteria • Confirm inclusion of all

eligible candidates

Final list of eligible Award candidates, representing success stories worldwide

7 Perform quality check

Develop official Award consideration materials

• Perform final performance benchmarking activities

• Write nominations • Perform quality review

High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees’ successes

8 Reconnect with panel of industry experts

Finalize the selection of the best practices Award recipient

• Review analysis with panel • Build consensus • Select recipient

Decision on which company performs best against all best practices criteria

9 Communicate recognition

Inform Award recipient of recognition

• Present Award to the CEO • Inspire the organization for

continued success • Celebrate the recipient’s

performance

Announcement of Award and plan for how recipient can use the Award to enhance the brand

10 Take strategic action

Upon licensing, company is able to share Award news with stakeholders and customers

• Coordinate media outreach • Design a marketing plan • Assess Award’s role in

strategic planning

Widespread awareness of recipient’s Award status among investors, media personnel, and employees



The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards Research Methodology Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research methodology represents the analytical rigor of the research process. It offers a 360-degree view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of Frost & Sullivan’s research methodologies. Too often companies make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, resulting in errors of both omission and commission. Successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the 360-degree research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.

About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, helps clients accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's growth team with disciplined research and best practices models to drive the generation, evaluation, and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages nearly 60 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from 45 offices on 6 continents. To join Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Partnership, visit http://www.frost.com.

360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN THE CHAOS

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best practices award template - frost & sullivan … · ibm cloud object storage is a flexible,...

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