EMC....and storage in general....
Hi. Listen, I hate to derail the discussion on Cree the gorilla candidate, with something so mundane as a storage king, but I thought re-posting some comments from Bill F. from the EMC thread would be worthwhile. I think he's pretty smart, and seems to have a vision of things. Focus on the last 2 paragraphs.
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To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (9196)
From: Bill Fischofer Wednesday, Feb 9, 2000 9:05 PM ET
Respond to Post # 9197 of 9212
Nada, zip, zilch.
SUNW is in the same position as HWP with regards to EMC, only more so because of their anti-Wintel stance. The only way they could compete is by losing their processor-centric bias. That isn't going to happen. I've seen absolutely nothing to suggest that SUNW's world-view doesn't revolve around Big Iron running Solaris. No doubt they'll sell some SUNW storage to SUNW processor accounts but these sort of rear-guard actions, for all their bluster, are merely further evidence of how lethal the EMC threat is so their core business. The principle is really very simple: The money follows the data. The corollary is: Whoever owns the data owns the account.
The latter is the real key to understanding the full scope of the sea change that's happening in the IT world. Traditionally, a datacenter would view itself as an "IBM shop", a "DEC shop", a "Sun shop", etc. and didn't pay much attention to the brand of disks that were attached to their processor. In the not-too-distant future companies will view themselves as an "EMC shop" and not pay too much attention to the brand of processors that attach to their storage network. This is the sort of role-reversal that makes EMC such a potent competitive threat to traditional box vendors. The Storage Network is becoming the new center of the enterprise and processors are moving to the periphery. That's all one really has to know to appreciate EMC's unique competitive position.
There was a lot of talk today about CSCO becoming the first company to achieve a Trillion-dollar market cap. My personal view is that it's a three-way race between MSFT, CSCO, and EMC to achieve that distinction. That's how big the opportunity is here for EMC.
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Apollo
PS: last July, I wanted to take a position in Storage, and couldn't decide between NTAP and EMC. So I PM'd Bill F. and asked his opinion. His opinion was that they were both great, but favored EMC because it sells to high-end, high margin customers. Since then NTAP has to date been the better buy. But I think his and some others' view is that over the long haul, and especially if EMC can dip into the NAS space successfully, that EMC may be strong over many years. I suspect they'll both do well, because Storage is on fire, and in the tornado. |
