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Recently TMC’s (News - Alert) Erin Harrison had a chance at Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, Calif. to sit down and talk with Storsimple’s (News - Alert) Chief Marketing Officer, Ian Howells. He explained that the company focuses on optimized cloud storage, “Our whole philosophy is that you can really get all the benefits of the cloud and bring them into your enterprise applications, rather than take your enterprise applications out into the cloud.”

One of the things they find really useful, he said, is a tool called Google (News - Alert) Insights. “It’s a great way to predict the future. It tells you how often people search a term.” If you put “cloud computing” in, for example, Howells said, “it’s going pretty much vertically. If you put ‘SharePoint’ in there, it’s growing at a similar rate.”

He said there’s “massive adoption” of SharePoint in the end user space, “because they just like to use that, and it’s causing the amount of content you have in an enterprise to grow 50 to 60 percent a year. And you’re typically getting more content than you can manage in a SharePoint environment,” which is about 100 gigabytes.

“We believe,” Howells said, “you can take SharePoint and link it into the cloud, things like Azure, and you can scale SharePoint not just to gigabytes, to terabytes, and make it the content platform for an organization.”

One thing they find interesting, Howells said, is that “if you think about predictability, one of the beautiful things about the cloud is that it’s elastic. You can go from one CPU to a hundred CPUs. But in an organization the thing that drives the number of CPUs I want is the employees. That doesn’t double in a year. That’s pretty predictable.”

But since their data usage is not, that’s where storage becomes important.