I agree with both your premise and conclusion regarding the on going commoditization of storage. The OP lays out application integration and software integratio

I agree with both your premise and conclusion regarding the on going commoditization of storage. The OP lays out application integration and software integration as routes for storage providers to follow, which I tend to agree with, but the ideas can be better generalized as problems of horizontal and vertical integration (respectively). Different forms of commodity businesses exists in both the horizontal and vertical markets here, so as you point out, storage providers are likely to begin searching for customers with problems that they can build/grow into the function of their platform.