TechTarget Storage Media: What Sets Us Apart

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00:06 Jillian Coffin: Hello everyone and welcome to the TechTarget special presentation, thanks for joining me. My name is Jillian Coffin. I'm the vice president and group publisher at TechTarget.

00:18 We've had a long-standing partnership with the Flash Memory Summit for some years now.

00:24 And it's just been a great partnership and I'm so happy they were able to do the virtual event this year so we can extend all of this great content and all of these great keynote presentations to some new audiences across the globe.

00:40 So for some of you who might not be familiar with TechTarget and what we do, I just wanted to take a minute to kind of explain our business model and kind of where we fit into this whole storage flash ecosystem.

00:52 At TechTarget we have 10 global websites or web communities that we host across the globe. Some of the sites that you might recognize would be SearchStorage, SearchConvergedInfrastructure, SearchDataBackup. These are sites that have been in market for a long time. We also publish Storage Magazine. Actually, it used to be a physical magazine and now we have an online version. So, you know we are really involved in leading some of the content and market insights in the in the storage space for a long time, which is why we've had this this great partnership with the Flash Memory Summit team.

01:35 So, you know, really our model we produce a lot of content around some of the most important growth topics in the infrastructure space, so whether it whether we're talking about NAS or markets evolving cloud data management, storage for unstructured data and via NVMe You have our fabrics, AI ops.

02:04 Whatever the topic is, we are producing content around these topics and we're doing it to basically meet the information needs of our audiences across these web communities.

02:17 And because we're producing so much content, we rank really high in organic search for some of the most important high-volume search terms in Google.

02:25 So this means we're capturing a lot of the best, most relevant traffic from Google into our websites. And once you know once the audience comes into our network and they're engaging with content, we're able to, again, see that activity and basically share those insights with our customers. So, it's a business model that's working out really well for us. And I think it's really helping to connect storage buyers with storage sellers.

03:02 So the other important thing I wanted to call out is TechTarget  as a business still really invests heavily in the storage market. We still have a very large dedicated editorial team who covers this space and produces content. We also work with a number of great contributors and experts in the space. A lot of these faces, you probably recognize some of the smartest people in our industry.

03:30 And really the goal here is to make sure we're putting the best content out there and content that can really help people solve problems and do their jobs. So, again, just looking at some of these numbers -- almost 30 content producers and over 1,000 content pieces that we publish and really on some of these granular topic areas.

03:53 Another thing I wanted to call out is just the way we approach content because I do think it is something that sets us apart in this broader industry.

04:01 A good way to think about is sort of different buckets. Right.

04:06 We have industry coverage, where we'll call that news. Basically, if there's mergers and acquisitions. Big product announcements or things that are worthy of coverage and people need to know about them we’ll cover it, but the bulk of our effort is really around helping people understand some of these technologies and get started with them or evaluate and compare vendors are certain solutions and ways to solve problems. And then we have other things like managing and decision making and really our goal is to really have a balanced amount of content in some of these buckets, because that's really how you help buyers or anybody who's trying to make a decision really move along their journey right wherever they are, we have stuff for you, no matter where you are in this process. And that's really important to call out. The other thing that's really interesting about how purchases are happening today is just, there's so much change.

05:09 With buying team dynamics, there's a study, we just did showing there's about seven people or more on average who are involved in a purchase for infrastructure right now. So that's a much bigger group of people than we used to see in past years. So, there's a lot of change.

05:28 Gartner talks about the rise of the generalist and we're seeing this we when we track our new-to-network members, folks who sign up for certain things. We're seeing huge growth in IT generalist titles; for storage-specific topics, we're seeing a 12% decrease.

05:43 In the new members with storage-specific titles, we're seeing more member growth in membership, but we have people that do not necessarily have storage in their title. So again, some interesting dynamics to watch and think about as a community,

06:01 We have to be able to educate more people about the benefits of storage. It's such a foundational layer to so many important things right now, whether it be cloud or AI or hyperscale high-performance computing, storage is this really important layer and with more and more people getting involved in these decisions, we need the content to educate them.

06:23 So TechTarget’s going to be doing four sessions this week and I really hope you tune in.

06:29 We have an annual IT Priority Survey that we do with 3,500 global technology buyers. We have some great data from that some pollster survey that we just did to the data science teams and around AI and machine learning.

06:43 And just a lot of insights again into the activities of our audiences and folks who we know have had confirmed storage project in the past year.

06:53 So a lot of this data, you'll see in some of the sessions. We're doing one around AI machine learning, one is around enterprise applications and the role flash is going to play. We have another one around data growth and a future with zettabytes, and then of course the pandemic's impact on storage spending.

07:12 And most of these have panels, lots of really great stuff and information that you can get. I have a preview of some of the data that you'll be able to take a peek at and some of these sessions. This is an example of how we're looking at companies' overall response posture post pandemic. So, what are the things that they're spending more on and what are some of the things that they're spending less on and just what's top of mind and how storage companies need to think about this, the role that they play.

07:42 Just some examples of little changes we're seeing in purchase requirements for flash projects, where were you were seeing a little a slight uptick or, or, in some cases, a very large uptick in one particular purchase requirement from April to September. So, this is again some data like this. We're also going to be talking about topics you think about, such as NVMe over Fabrics.

08:08 You know, we're writing a lot about that particular topic. And there's an audience that's engaging with that. But we also a lot of the content that we produce around NVMe is also around related topics and sort of measuring that and looking at that is really interesting because you can sort of start seeing who the folks are who are engaging with NVMe.

08:28 Here are some of the other topics that they really care about is there a correlation there and how can we be smart about helping them with any project or any decision they need to make. And then you know where NVMe sort of fits into all of that.

08:44 Again last example, I'm really looking forward to seeing many of you at some of the sessions this week, but this is a quick preview of our new data science and AI pulse survey where we asked questions about to the data science and machine learning team, where do you focus more of your time? And I thought, an interesting thing to call out especially at the Flash Memory Summit is that 26% plan on building or running or spend a lot of their time building or running the infrastructure to support this, which is really interesting.

09:18 And then we also asked about barriers to entry and why are they not achieving their full value from the data science.

09:25 Machine learning adoption and you can see here that you know skills expertise and just the complexity of all of this are still huge pain points and barriers for many companies.

09:35 So again, just want to show you a sneak peek of some of this data. Please join us at one of our sessions and we have a booth at the show. So, if there's any questions that we can answer or if you'd like to see any of this data in real time, please don't hesitate to reach out.

09:51 Thank you.