Every business looking to get ahead could use some magic.  In an article published this morning, Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante discussed the significance of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays. He talked about the new format and detailed how it reflects the transition that the storage market is undergoing on this morning’s NewsDesk show with Kristin Feledy (full video below).

Vellante starts by providing some background on the report, which is delivered in the form of a chart: Gartner started publishing the series around two decades ago in order to give CIOs a consolidated view of the market without forcing them to do too much reading. He explains that the  “Magic Quadrant” is the upper rightmost section of the graph, which lists the industry’s top vendors.

The most notable thing about this latest edition is that it clumps the low-end and high-end array markets together instead of providing a separate illustration for each. Vellante says that this change is significant because it is a powerful indication that the lines are blurring in the storage space.

“Definitions of what we now know as traditional storage arrays aren’t as useful in terms of comparing different products and different business models,” Vellante notes. “As we talked about Kristin, the whole market is changing with Hadoop and big data and flash and so many other innovations that are coming to the fore. And I think that this is the first step in Gartner’s transition to the new world.”

Vellante says that the new format is a step in the right direction, but he believes that there’s still a lot of room for improvement. He points out that the storage market is no longer centered on multi-million “containers” – it consists of many individual components including servers, software and networking that are converging on the one hand and becoming more open source friendly on the other. Gartner did not single out these areas in this year’s report and Vellante believes there are complexities in doing so.

“Gartner is a large organization servicing many thousands of clients and for it to just start creating Magic Quadrants that cut across many technology domains is not trivial. The firm has to be careful not to contradict the different opinions of its various analysts.”

Vellante believes that the future of storage is not about boxes, rather its about extracting software value that’s locked in controllers and scaling out architectures to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and flexibility. He says that traditionally every time a new standard or protocol or API is released it necessitates a new “box” to be built. He claims this model has led to terrible inefficiencies and waste.

See Vellante’s full analysis below, and read his complete commentary here.