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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (10564)	11/17/1999 8:47:00 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

>> There doesn't seem to be much barrier to entry vis-a-vis proprietary knowledge or value chain John, that's exactly the consensus evaluation the thread arrived at some months ago, but I'm hoping we may be able to find some ipr this time. Gilder's view of the nas arena suggests that the sector may not commoditize. But even if it did, ntap is in position to be a very strong King as evidenced by their current market share and growth rate. Kings in a Tornado can make you a lot of money, provided you hold them lightly. uf

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (10564)	11/17/1999 9:19:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

John, let me make some distinctions for you. INTC and others are getting into the server farm business as service providers==not as product providers. These service providers will be come big NTAP, EMC, et al customers. There are significant barriers to entry into the SAN/NAS product market. NTAP has patents on storage techniques, NVRAM management techniques, clustering technologies, etc. They also have many staff years invested in R&D that is proprietary. You can easily compare NTAP to CSCO. CSCO is a software company. Their hardware components are from others and are commodities. Same for NTAP. NTAP interfaces to the network using standard comm protocols and to the application programs using standard file protocols. What is behind those file protocols is intellectual property==patented software. Hope that helps.