"Data General has been going through a major program during the past year to beef up their direct sales activities," said Jim Porter, an analyst with Disk Trend, in Mountain View, Calif., noting that the company had previously sold most of its storage products to computer systems manufacturers rather than to users.
Will Clariion be competitive in a direct sales market? It is one thing for HWP to sell an HWP-branded storage system to an HWP UX customer. It is entirely another for EMC to sell an EMC-branded system to an HWP UX customer. Customers look more closely at specs and competitors when a third party shows up to sell add-ons.
"Direct sales is an EMC specialty, so this is going to make a fundamental change in how Data General does business," Porter said.
One of the most difficult aspects of this business is fielding a good direct sales force. The second most difficult is to make that sales force profitable selling mid-range configurations. This is not trivial.
They've been selling Clariion for some time now, so it is a fairly well-known product in the marketplace," he said. "The reason it hasn't been more successful is it never had all the software to make it more useful. We have that software. And, more importantly, we have the largest direct-selling storage sales force in the world and the best storage service organization in the world."
That software is not "portable". There will be a ton of work to do to give Clariion the benefit of EMC software.
But he added that EMC was interested in applying Aviion's NUMA technology, a method for having multiple processors use a common supply of memory, in its storage management products.
"The only other company that had that technology was Sequent, which was just acquired by I.B.M.," he said.
NTAP has been using NUMA technology for a couple of years in its clustered configurations. I believe it got the technology from Tandem, but not positive.
"They moved away from SCSI a little ahead of the pack, and this bold gamble did not pay off because they got there too early," Porter said. "But now, fiber channel is becoming a major part of the high-end market."
Why would adopting FC "too early" be a gamble? I don't understand this statement at all. Somebody help me with this.
Sorry for the negative tone from me, but this discussion reaks of lame excuses and a weak vision. And I am long EMC!
|
