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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mariner who wrote (1108)	6/20/1999 12:34:00 PM
From: Mehitabel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

mariner-- research by Banc Boston Rob Steph discussed the "competition from compaq" and made these points: most of NTAP growth, sales and profits come from systems over $25K. This is where the very high growth in the NAS market actually is, according to IDC. Compaqs systems are $10K or under. my own remarks about "competition from compaq" are as follows: 1. NTAP employs highly trained engineer-salespeople. Who does compaq employ? Compaq talks the big talk about "going direct", and "selling on the internet", but no one has seen them do it successfully yet. 2. compaq is losing market share to dell, you could even say cpq is actually bleeding market share. Dell is selling NTAP systems right now. Obviously cpq doesn't have a lot of credibility in corporate circles right now. They have a long way to go before they get it back, imo Gee, here's a mystery: Who will will this competition?

To: mariner who wrote (1108)	6/21/1999 4:41:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 10934

RE: Switching from NTAP to a competitor. First, what would motivate a customer to switch from NTAP to a competitive product? Speed--no one comes close to NTAP response time in the same price/MB range. Reliability--NTAP measures empiracly its reliability in the field. It is consistently above 99.9% and climbing. Price--see Speed. (I could amplify on all this, but won't unless called to.) So if a customer decided to migrate away from NTAP I would be very concerned as to "why", not "how". The "how" is relatively easy. It's like buying a new server and copying your files from your old server. That is not to say that the new server is as fast, simple and reliable as the old. The real question is how well NTAP (&Dell) can do competing against "the big boys" in the market place. Is the sales force strong enough? Can NTAP overcome any CPQ privilege in old accounts?