CAS Market Awareness study

[vanessa]

Hi everyone,
thank you so much for participating in the CAS Market Awareness study. We had a great turn out and everyone who participated should have recieved a copy of the highlights.

This discussion group is dedicated to answering your questions about the research and providing more details when we can to any related questions about the data.

It is so exciting to see how much CAS is starting to penetrate the market and gain greater acceptance! CAS is on its way!

thanks again for participating in the survey and we look forward to your questions;

best

Vanessa

[rickg]

I want to thank you for conducting and analyzing the results of this great research and do have a question / statement about one particular finding. I refer to the chart on page 7 of the pdf you kindly sent to those of us who took the survey. It is titled 'Why are you interested in CAS?'

The responses from CAS members vs. non I found to be very interesting. For instance the largest proportion of CAS members (53.7%) find they use the technology for email management and content management, with compliance being a close third.

When you look at non CAS community members, they by far choose records management as why they are interested in CAS.

I am interested in your insight. But what this tells me is that more education of the buying and IT community at large is necessary. To me records management would logically be a very generic answer to what you need a fixed content storage device for.....whereas those who understand CAS have specific issues they are addressing with content, email archiving or compliance regulations.

[vanessa]

Thank you so much for your question about the results! Across the board - when we segmented the results of the survey, it was consistantly apparent that those that have a deeper familiarity with CAS had a clearer understanding of its uses. The data that you point to is a strong illustration of a repeated finding;

The responses from CAS members vs. non I found to be very interesting. For instance the largest proportion of CAS members (53.7%) find they use the technology for email management and content management, with compliance being a close third.

Clearly, people with greater and more frequent access to information about CAS were able to distinguish many more reasons for using CAS.

There is still a need for further market information to be shared about CAS and efforts such as CAS community help share the uses, best practices and information about CAS with people who are seeking storage alternatives.

While CAS awareness is growing rapidly ( you should see the stats on this site! We have tripled in use over the past year!!) there is still a great deal of market education that needs to take place. Users and potential users are just starting to become aware of the uses of CAS and just starting to think about it in a way that is decoupled from the storage devices it is often OEMed on. The advent of SOX, risk management and compliance regulations has furthered the awareness of CAS but the market still has a way to go to fully understand the cost and labor reduction ROI metrics that are also associated with CAS deployment.

[JoeF]

Will there be any more studies in the upcoming months?