| I may have missed people's posts about this, but it seems to me that in the midst of the gyrations of prices, maybe people paid insufficient attention to what seems to me an enormously important announcement about NTAP. That is, the deal with IBM. All of a sudden, NTAP's sales force has increased by several hundred times. IBM is saying, just as they did to SEBL, "Hey, you seem to have a great product. Instead of competing with you we'd like to be part of your success. Let us sell it for you and do the ongoing consulting." IBM is very very serious about expanding their consulting activities. A friend at IBM told me with glee that they had installed SAP at an important new customer's site. He looked forward to lots of business there. IBM selling and managing SAP? It seems IBM will sell you and manage for you ANYTHING, now, as long as the product is top class, useful, and popular. We know that NTAP stuff is a lot easier to manage than SAP software. In any case while NTAP has to divide the profit with IBM, this should be great for sales. I won't say this is as important as Ericsson's surrender to QCOM's patents, but it does look very big. DownSouth is the expert here of course, it's just my impression. |
