NTAP has not licensed its technology to others. NTAP is in the business of making deliverable product. Patents are used to protect its price/performance advantage.
NTAP was instrumental (founded) the NDMP standards body, to which most in the data backup business now conform. NTAP did this because there was no industry standard for backup restore and in order for the backup designers to develop techniques that worked cross-storage-platform, NDMP was needed.
NTAP is also instrumental in the DAFS standards body.
I understand the nature of your question, I believe, and it is a good one.
What one must understand is that NTAP is not in the business of creating standards. NTAP is in the business of conforming to the standards relative to storage and networking (NFS, CIFS, NDMP, DAFS, TCP/IP, FDDI, ATM, FC, ...) by interfacing these standards to a superior storage software system (ONTAP/WAFL/SNAP/Content Mgt...) that is protected by patents.
Their gorillaness does not come from patents and standards that others must buy from them. It comes from price/performance/capabilities that competitors cannot duplicate (because of NTAP innovations protected by patents) that best-satisfy market needs.
Though still evolving, NTAP's model is very similar to CSCO's. CSCO is not in the business of selling to manufacturers of network gear. It is in the business of selling boxes based on its protected software. CSCO and NTAP are out to provide complete solutions, end-to-end, that lock a customer into their architectures. |
