Even when business shrinks, customers collect and store data. Storage vendor product sales so far seem to be holding up despite the overall drop in IT spending caused by a very noticeable decline in customer spending and in IT budgets, but all bets are off for next year. EMC, for instance, expects its fourth quarter sales to be noticeably higher than last year's, but NetApp's forecast is more cloudy. IBM's third-quarter storage sales fell, while HP's rose. However, the mix is changing.
