Respectively you will notice that EMC is selling into the high cap / Fortune 500 type of companies while NTAP is selling into the smaller cap players.
Eric, I think you misread the cards here. The fact is that NTAP has good presence in the F500, though not the base that EMC does. NTAP is selling into the big cap technology companies and into the smaller caps. That is simply a result of a basic concept of Tornado marketing--the early adapters of new technology tend to be the technology companies. EMC grew up in the IBM computer room. NTAP grew up in the server closet. I am not concerned about NTAP's customers scaling back. They are the leaders in high tech and are not suceptable to the slow down in PC sales.
In fact, to the degree that PC sales are slowing in growth rates because of the growth of the internet based model, that is very good for NTAP's customers.
A lot of significant players (IBM, SUNW, etc.) have announced new thrusts into the storage market but I have been noticing most involve NAS product announcements. I have only noticed one or two talking about SAN, which may in itself speak loudly. But if (and many here on this thread feel that is a big IF) the NAS market experiences greater increased competition, who will feel the impact greater, EMC or NTAP bearing in mind the current market share of NAS vs. SAN.
The lack of new SAN announcements from the likes of IBM, SUNW, etc., is a result of the perception that NAS in a disruptive innovation and represents the growth technology of the future. They are as much a threat to EMC as they are to NTAP. The fact is we are in a storage market, not a NAS or SAN market.
What you must remember is that NAS is NOT A DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION! What is disrutpive is NTAP's dis-integration of the file system of the general purpose OS. That is what WAFL does so effectively. Others are introducing NAS products, but these products lack the price/performance/reliability of NTAP, and, perhaps as important, do not have the end-to-end content management solution built on top, as NTAP does. |
