The proliferation of proprietary formats and interfaces among storage management products severely limited the reseller's choices for offering new, competitive products. Customers want the assurance that the products they buy to protect their data today won't hinder their success tomorrow. The emerging storage management standards provide the assurance customers need, and this translates into increased sales opportunities for resellers. In addition, the products themselves are more price-competitive.
Standards also shorten the sales cycle.
Tapes could not be interchanged because a common tape format didn't exist. Until recently, resellers and their customers were, in essence, held hostage by the limitations of their vendor's proprietary architectures and data formats. Many vendors even have products within their own product line that are incompatible. If an organization wanted to change systems, they had to keep the old backup software and hardware in case they needed access to one of their archived tapes. SMS and SIDF Standards SMS is a defacto standard developed by Novell to provide a consistent interface into the network's file system.