Chris,
I think most of us have given serious consideration to what the Asian crisis could do to Ancor, given that their major current customer (Hucom) is from Japan. However, every indication from Ancor is that the crisis has not affected them, at least not yet. That isn't to say that this couldn't change, but so far, it hasn't been a problem.
As far as comments about Cisco's Gigabit Ethernet offering, there was a flurry of discussion right after the Granite acquisition, but Cisco hasn't really had any products to talk about until recently. I do believe that Gigabit Ethernet will virtually stop the encroachment of competing technologies such as ATM and Fibre Channel on the LAN side of the network. However, Fibre Channel should have an advantage down the road as Storage Area Networks become more pervasive, and network managers see the advantage of extending this network all the way to the workstation. As I've said before, storage devices will have Fibre Channel ports, not Gigabit Ethernet ports.
I am also waiting for a significant event to occur in the minds of the big networkers. The realization that Storage Area Networks are actually NETWORKS, with major growth potential. When/if this happens, it should be a HUGE plus for Fibre Channel.
<<Still, if we assume that markets are relatively liquid, and there is an opportunity for great gain in this product segment, either Ancor's price should be 10 times what it is, there should be more competitors, or 99.99% of the investors are stupid.>>
I think the answer might be "All of the above". <g>
Craig |
