Storage de ja vu

Back in 2003, a number of us in the analyst community viewed the acquisition of the 800 lb gorilla in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace, aka Documentum, to be an exercise based upon the premise of EMC having so much in the way of storage products available, it needed to offer enterprises something to put on those products.  Roll on nearly a decade and we have the offer of  Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glacier to replace tape archives. Ignoring the current (but relevant) debates on pricing, response times, and issues of bandwidth to the Glacier offering, I personally like the idea. It is a modus operandi that is already prevalent in the consumer community. We upload our pictures to the likes of Flikr, Facebook etc not just because we want to show off, but because we believe our valuable memories will be safe there. Many use the likes of BOX.COM and Dropbox as personal archives, and many put their online passwords into emails on universally accessible webmail sites. AWS could be on to a winner.with Glacier, expect Microsoft et al to follow.