The rapid adoption of broadband internet services, combined with the explosive growth of storage-intensive rich media and the desire to protect company-critical information are driving demand for computer and storage management systems.

In addition, physical data center limitations are driving demand for storage devices with lower power consumption and space-saving features. As a result, we expect the market for hardware to be solid for years to come.

Our hardware coverage focuses on two sectors: storage and computers.

The storage sector coverage includes industry titans EMC, NetApp and Seagate, as well as Netezza and SonicWALL. Data storage needs are being driven by government regulation, the fear of data loss, and the ever expanding size of content files. From productivity files in Word and PowerPoint to multimedia files like movies, music, and e-Books, files are ever increasing in size. Google Gmail displays a ticker advertising seven-gigabytes of free e-mail storage and rising, boasting “you’ll never need to delete another message.” Whether data is stored on a home or office personal computer or in the cloud on corporate servers, data is accumulated, backed up, and rarely deleted. EMC and NetApp provide corporations and large organizations the tools needed to rapidly transmit and store large quantities of data over a network. Netezza’s products allow for the efficient analysis and mining of massive quantities customer data, with the goal of recognizing and reacting to trends in real-time.

Our large cap computer sector coverage features Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Research in Motion. IBM, Dell, and HP compete for server market share, as companies migrate to commodity x86 hardware from UNIX and vendor lock-in. IBM continues to sell a full gauntlet of servers, from low end to mainframes, while HP and Dell focus on migrating customers to Blade-style servers, which combine multiple computing systems into a single large enclosure. Blades allow for more computing power to be packed into a smaller area.

Apple, Dell, and HP compete in the rapidly expanding laptop market, and while Apple is rapidly gaining share in the US, it remains distant to HP and Dell for now. Apple’s impact on the global laptop market has been muted, although it continues to expand sales quickly. Research in Motion and Apple compete in the smartphone market, with RIMM dominating the business space and Apple controlling the consumer space. RIMM grants remote workers a wide range of productivity features, from mobile phone to e-mail to word processing. Apple offers a sleek interface and more consumer slanted features, although both companies are seeking to extend its products into the other’s domain as features begin to overlap.