DJ Network Appliance CEO: UNIX And NT Storage Is $35B Opp
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--The market opportunity for Unix and NT external storage is $35 billion today and all of that opportunity is open to Network Appliance Inc. (NTAP), said Chief Executive Daniel Warmenhoven.
What determines the growth rate in that $35 billion market is how Network Appliance, Sunnyvale, Calif., educates customers about its products, he said Tuesday during a presentation at the Merrill Lynch storage conference in Santa Barbara, Calif.
According to Warmenhoven, there is a shift going on in data storage. Chief information officers, who run their businesses with many different applications and platforms, are no longer buying storage from their server vendor. Rather these CIO's are thinking about storage as its own entity, he said.
And the companies that can provide storage across all the platforms will see the most market-share gains, Warmenhoven said.
Currently the two highest growth areas of storage are network attached storage, or NAS, and storage attached networks, or SAN. Warmenhoven said both address different parts of storage and will eventually fuse together to provide a more complete system.
When asked about the impact of EMC Corp. (EMC) entering the NAS market, Warmenhoven said EMC's product is "immature" and it is yet to be determined if it will ever mature. He added that EMC's NAS product is not a competitive threat.
In December, EMC unveiled the company's much anticipated Clariion IP4700, which sells for around $82,000 and was designed to give Network Appliance a run for its money.
As for Network Appliance's original equipment manufacturing, or OEM, strategy, Warmenhoven said that until there is "demand pull" the OEM model won't be successful. He added that it may never get there.
Network Appliance tried to adopt an OEM strategy with Dell Computer Corp. ( DELL), but was unsuccessful because Dell's sales force was used to responding to customer needs and had a hard time convincing customers to buy a NAS product, he said.
-By Donna Fuscaldo, Dow Jones Newswires, 201-938-5253;
donna.fuscaldo@dowjones.com
(END) DOW JONES NEWS 01-31-01
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