Tim, it sounds interesting. It's obviously a speculative
situation. It's a little scary that it's doing so poorly
while most of tech is rallying.
SSB has been commenting how business conditions in storage
have been improving with a number of deals being done
recently.
we believe the
theme was very positive: large storage deals. Large deals could be because
1) excess storage capacity has been worked through, and companies need to buy
storage -- our bet as the most likely reason, 2) government IT spending has
significantly increased, 3) there is a year-end budget flush, 4) data
continues to grow regardless of budgetary constraints, and 5) companies are
focusing on data replication and disaster recovery (DR) -- although we
actually expect replication and DR demand to kick in during 2002 due to the
6-9 month ramp time it takes to structure and plan for such architectures.
Companies doing large deals that we have uncovered include: Brocade (seeing
larger and larger SANs), Compaq (of course), EMC (of course), HDS (of
course), IBM (of course), NetApp (which has done a few EMC sized deals in the
10-50 terabyte range -- some mirrored), Inrange (due to its direct sales
force and long haul, end-to-end branded solutions -- read DR), McData (by
leveraging its relationship with EMC), StorageTek, and Veritas (which has a
record size large deal in every one of the company's geographic regions and
also has already closed the largest deal of the quarter).
Companies with over 50% of the quarter done going into December (that we know
of, based on our research): EMC, Emulex and Veritas. Note: both Brocade and
NetApp have January quarters and are off to a great start.
Tidbit: We hear that the Sun/HDS deal is ramping (i.e. revenueing) nicely
this quarter and that the Dell/EMC deal is expected to ramp early next year.
Storage World Conference Supports Positive Outlook |
