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....
Do the math. At $8.87B in 2000 sales, EMC obviously purchases more components than NTAP and gets cheaper components. With EMC Software at $1.44B in 2000 sales, EMC can also push more software behind its hardware. Those software products carry 90% gross margins. Keep in mind that at $210M, NAS represent less than 3% of EMC's overall sales of $2.6B in 4Q2000.
The fact of the matter is that EMC eventually surpasses NTAP in unit shipments simply by selling to its installed base of 45,000+ Symmetrix units and 30,000-40,000 Clariion units. Start getting used to it.
Like a NTAP zealot, I'm sure that you're going to insist that NTAP's technology is so superior to EMC's technology that EMC will never be able to catch up. The numbers, however, tell otherwise. For instance, NTAP sold 600 units of the F840 over 90 days while EMC sold 250 units of the IP4700 over 25 days. In case you haven't noticed, EMC upped the ante and improved the value proposition of the IP4700 during this quarter by releasing the FC4700 which can be converted into an IP4700 with the simple change of software and an interface card.
Again, the pointed question for you before you get lost in the technical minutiae is why NTAP growing slower than the overall NAS market while EMC is growing faster than the overall NAS market. Ponder on that for a while before you launch another series of tiresome emotional arguments. |
