The accounts receivable/DSO fluctuation occurs depending on
geographic makeup of sales - whether it skews to US or outside
US and also segment makeup of sales - enterprise or smaller. The
thing you neglect to mention is book-to-bill, which they still say
is 1 - even in a very tough quarter.
If competition were so great, wouldn't you expect to see a major
erosion of gross margin - which hasn't occurred? Is there's a
receivables problem - wouldn't you expect to see book-to-bill
to drop way below one?
Also: you completely ignored the quote, from EMC management, that
they had the same problem. I'm not parotting anything, I'm presenting
a balanced argument, unlike your slanted argument.
> For example, there are anecdotal reports that EMC
> is pricing the high availability IP4700 at least
> 20% under the single-point-of failure F840.
> Expect even more aggressive pricing as EMC
> catapults its reseller partners off to a good
> start. EMC buys more components and can push
> more software behind its hardware.
It's amazing to me that you are excited about EMC dropping
margin on products as the only way to be able to sell them!
Another question you neglected to answer: the IP4700 benchmarks
with RAID *OFF*, meaning they are featuring its performance
numbers with a single-point-of-failure. Does EMC have a
reason for that?
Finally, NTAP management made those comments about EMC salespeople
in response to an analyst question saying: "EMC says you are road kill,
game over." NTAP said, and has always said, when customers compare
NTAP's product head-to-head with a Celerra and now IP4700 they almost
always win. They encourage head-to-head competition. In fact,
they say they win a lot against the Symmetrix.
I have *NEVER* heard EMC management encourage head-to-head tests
of their products against NTAP. Have you? |
