To All,
I will be out of the office all day today, but I wanted to weigh in on several items.
My thanks to everyone who has supported my hard-line questioning of Ancor management yesterday during the conference call. We got some answers yesterday that we hadn't gotten before, and finally got some recognition that some strategic mistakes were made. True leaders are rarely perfect, but almost always recognize the mistakes that they have made, AND WORK TO CORRECT THEM. If Ancor management does this, I believe that opportunities still exist to succeed in the Fibre Channel market.
I hold no lingering animosity towards management, other than the frustration of seeing the value of my ANCR investment reduced to pocket change. These are truly a nice bunch of guys, who got caught in the slow adoption of Fibre Channel switching. The new sales team is a major plus, and if Ancor can start delivering switches that have all the features customers want at a competitive price, I think they will get a share of the OEM business. However, they have to regain some sort of leadership position, either through hardware or software or both. If they constantly find themselves in a catch up position, they will have to settle for the 2nd-tier OEMs or 2nd-sourcing for some of the top-tier OEMs.
Ancor HAS the talent to do this, but they need to get everyone motivated and pulling together. I haven't seen the "fire in the belly" attitude from management that is needed to turn this around. That's one reason why we get a $100,000 quarter. This is probably management's biggest challenge. This is a highly competitive market, and requires a highly competitive company in order to succeed.
Craig |
