E, taking a shot at what Symbios means for LSI going forward, let's take a look at their product line. Symbios sells high reliability, state of the art storage controllers and storage subsystems to medium - large server companies. These are the Dells, Compaq's, HP's, etc. of the world. The servers are used to drive and control Internet, Intranet and other fast growing server applications. They require vast amounts of storage, measurable in terms of hundreds, or thousands of Gigabytes each. Lots of $$$. What's better is the fact that server storage has been growing faster in terms of % increase of revenue per year than the servers themselves. The servers will be no slouches, either, with sales of boxes based on the new Intel Xeon chip, and later Merced, expected to explode. Sun and others will also continue to sell a lot of servers into this market. Again, the Internet is the key driver to all this. Last I looked, it was growing at a fair clip. ;-)
The storage products that Symbios sells will represent a helluva lot of new revenue for LSI (not much overlap of products). Sure, LSI does sell some storage control chips, but Symbios goes further than that with their controller boards and storage subsystems.
As far as LSI providing ASICs to Symbios, I don't know. Symbios has their own LSI chip design capability. I wouldn't think LSI would choose to change Symbios much in this area, except maybe to offer some of their technology prowess in the CMOS LSI design or technology area, in which they have more experience. LSI maybe could help Symbios get their chips faster, lower power, more reliable, or get better yield, I don't know. I'm not sure about Symbios' fab capability and capacity. LSI could certainly come into play here.
In conclusion, LSI does chips, yes, systems on chips, but stops there. Symbios goes on to two more levels of integration, which are the board and subsystem levels. Sales of these levels should be completely additive to LSI current sales (as will be Symbios' unique storage controller chips). I like it.
Tony |
