IT departments are overwhelmed by the ever-increasing amount of data created by hundreds of applications and thousands of users. At large corporations, the volume of this data has grown into hundreds of terabytes, often distributed over multiple subsystems around the world. At the same time, the software for managing these storage devices has been a mixture of homegrown solutions and platform-specific third-party tools that require specialized expertise and do not integrate well.

To alleviate the pain of storage management, IT professionals seek to develop long-term data storage strategies that take advantage of the hardware they've accumulated over the years. Fujitsu Software Technology Company ("Softek") developed an innovative technology called Storage Manager. This product is an enterprise application that allows IT professionals to manage multiple third-party storage devices from one place.

Softek's product development team knew that they needed to present their technology in a way that met the needs of the people who would use it—storage administrators. First, they needed to understand the workflows of their users; then they needed a way to address these workflows with their technology. They called Cooper to figure out how to do both.

Cooper interviewed IT professionals at a range of medium to large companies, analyzed their needs, and in response designed a system that facilitates the visualization of storage both as a universal commodity and as a collection of individual components. During interviews with storage administrators, Cooper identified two primary workflows that determined the interface organization: finding, filtering, and analyzing; and automating actions.

Storage administrators need appropriate tools to help them find, filter, analyze, and view information about the storage they manage. Cooper designed a search utility using bounded controls to construct natural language search statements. This helps users easily create, store, and reuse relevant queries that keep the results searchable and manageable.

Because storage administrators either don't have tools, or can't trust the tools they do have, they often spend hours a week performing repetitive tasks. Cooper provided a way of reliably automating these tasks to help administrators focus on the exceptions and emergencies that require their undivided attention.

Cooper got up to speed in a complex domain and helped Softek define a new product category. By giving Softek a clear idea of who their users are, what tools they use, and where opportunities for improvement exist, Cooper helped Softek match their technological capabilities to real needs in the marketplace.

Storage Manager debuted in 2002 and has received glowing reviews from users and industry publications alike. The product was named the Storage Managment Software Product of the Year.