Current Projects
ISIC is currently pursuing four major research projects: Information Lifecycle Management, Home CIO, Interoperability and Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous Storage. The Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) project examines the views of senior management on ILM, its business and technical drivers, business value and organizational implementation. Its objective is to provide insights into current industry thinking on the topics of valuing information and lifecycle management of information value.
Home CIO, shorthand for the Digital Home Entertainment project, is a joint Centers initiative between ISIC and the USC Marshall School of Business, Center for Telecom Management. The project seeks to understand where converging technologies, new consumers and new firms are taking digital entertainment in the home. The project focuses on what lead technologies are driving what products and services in home entertainment, attracting what consumer segments, and driving what business model innovations that in turn will structure future competition.
The Interoperability project is currently being defined with corporate participation. The project addresses the drivers and consequences of proliferating standards, interfaces and platforms in storage and IT systems. Specifically, the business factors driving the proliferation of standards and interfaces, the resulting costs and complexity for users, and the market factors driving, or inhibiting, the reduction of interfaces, integration of standards, and improved interoperability.
The project on purchasing trends in Homogeneous vs Heterogeneous Storage is the first subproject under the Interoperability research effort. The project will collect and analyze the views of end users and the market in evaluating the costs and benefits of homogeneous versus heterogeneous storage architectures. The project’s focal question is: will current purchases of homogeneous storage systems increase or decrease over 2006 levels? A secondary question is: have proposed solutions addressing problems created by heterogeneous storage, such as storage virtualization, been deployed extensively enough for users to assess their effectiveness? Insight gained from this project will contribute to our work on Interoperability.
ISIC research is organized into three program areas: industry studies, user studies, and through an affiliation with UCSD's Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR), technical studies.
The ISIC's traditional focus has been on topics of interest to the storage industry and producers of storage technologies. We continue to develop projects with industry affiliates addressing the future of the storage industry, in terms of competition, profitability, and revenue growth.
ISIC is increasing its focus on the users of advanced storage and information technologies. An ongoing project is an investigation of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). ISIC recently completed a study exploring how Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers (CIO, CTO) view ILM, the relationship of ILM to other IT initiatives, and where ILM can deliver business value. Executive interviews were complemented by an industry survey administered through StorageNetworking.org. Several publications summarizing the project's key findings have published in 2006.
The ISIC also works with UCSD's Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) on technical work that enhances the capability and security of magnetic storage devices such as hard disk drives.
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