Vertical Markets
Early customers will be concentrated in vertical markets currently faced with high demands for archival and reference data. Government regulation drives a significant portion of archival storage demand. Regulated industries have inelastic demand for certain archival storage.
Finance
The SEC requires contractual and financial information to be held in write-once/read-only form for seven years. More recent regulations have mandated the archiving of all email transactions and phone conversations.
Medical
Recent HIPPA regulations require patient records and medical images to be held for the life of the patient plus twenty years, and to be available on short notice.
Pharmaceutical
Companies must keep associated records for the life of the drug plus twenty years.
The growth of permanent digital reference data and voluntary archiving is driven by organizations that purvey information as their primary value proposition.
Government
Economic and census data, digitization of national archives initiative, security data acquisition.
Fundamental research
Meteorology, Astronomy, Particle Physics, etc.
Financial/Insurance Services
Reference to historical financial and economic data, actuarial data for health, life, casualty insurance, etc.
Entertainment
Stock Photography, stock video, animation.
Geophysical
Geosciences, Seismic data, Remote sensing data.
Bioscience
Genomics, Proteomics.
These organizations accumulate permanent data at rates approaching thousands of Terabytes (Petabytes) per year. |
