Louisville, California-based StorageTek sparked a brouhaha in September 2003 when it announced plans to trademark the term, potentially restricting the ability of partners and rivals alike to the use the phrase, which has become the latest storage industry buzzword.
StorageTek UK’s director of ILM strategy Mark Maby told ComputerWire the company has received a trademark for ILM but having done so has chosen not to pursue any potential trademark claims in order to avoid a war with storage rivals such as EMC Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co. We felt it was more important that the philosophy gets out into the market place, he said.
StorageTek will quickly lose the trademark based on its disclosure that it has no plans to defend the mark, a fact that Maby indicated the company believed would promote adoption of ILM strategies.
ILM promises to enable businesses to reduce storage costs and meet legislative requirements by managing data throughout its lifecycle, storing data on the most appropriate device relative to its value, and enabling users to retrieve it quickly and efficiently when required.
The term was also adopted by EMC as the foundation of its sales strategies last year, while Hewlett-Packard protested against StorageTek’s plans to trademark it based on its claim that ILM had become an established industry-standard term.
Content from our partners
