>The Chm of the Board is Don Valentine, President of Seqoyah (sp). Mr. V. was Chm of the Board, I believe, of Cisco at their IPO and still has a very major role their. He hand-picked the CEO of NTAP, Dan Warmenhoven. Mr. V. is very much modeling the finances, methods, and culture of the company like Cisco.
You say NTAP has a niche. I respectfully disagree, in that a niche implies a limited market space. NTAP's filers fit well in any enterprise that is managing >250GB of data, growing rapidly, trying to control IT infrastructure management costs, and sensitive to the level of service its IT users experience. If they are struggling to manage a mixed Unix and NT environment and/or providing inter/intranet services, their need for NTAP is further amplified.
NTAP is capturing the attention and $'s of every major and most mid-tiered ISPs, a large chunk of the Fortune 500, and a nice piece of the federal marketplace.
They have squashed the major player in their space, but will face fierce competition as they encroach into EMC's space for network attached storage (filers), though the space is growing fast enough for them both to do very well for a long while. In web proxy serving/web caching, they have the only product line that includes a "software only" solution that also includes an "appliance" (softwarea and hardware) solution which are completely compatible.
Take a look at their web site www.netapp.com. It is rich with information.
Thanks for asking!
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