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

To: t36 who wrote (11714)	12/1/1999 10:53:00 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Respond to of 54805

>> wanted to ask you why ntap is such a great company Sue, I'd recommend you take the mention of a company on this thread as a starting point for your own due diligence. An easy starting point would be to read a few months worth of posts on the Network Appliance thread, where members have put forth their opinions, analyses, and links to analysts' and news reports. By the way, the leader of that thread is our threadmate, Sir Galahad. The nas sector is much smaller than the san sector and ntap, the King of NAS is much smaller than emc, the King of SAN. That's one reason they might get less press. uf

To: t36 who wrote (11714)	12/1/1999 11:58:00 PM
From: Apollo	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

NTAP.........STORAGE..... Sue, if you want to know why NTAP is terrific, might I suggest that you start with the more fundamental question, which is 'Why is storage important'? As we all already know, the internet users are doubling every 3 months; the number of web sites is outstripping the ability of search engines to find them. Apparently, every click on a hyperlink, and every web page "hit" is "stored". Huge corporations, and little enterprise guys alike, have immense storage needs as E-commerce accelerates. Like I mentioned earlier today, E-commerce is estimated to be a $1.3 trillion market by 2003, with 9/10 of that to be B2B and the rest B2C (business to consumer, eg Amazon, etoys, etc). Therefore, the storage industry is one of the fundamental underpinnings of internet enabling infrastructure. As goes internet growth, so goes the Storage Industry. If you want to understand this, I would recommend you try to understand Storage as a whole, then can narrow down to the Kings, EMC and NTAP. As an EMC shareholder, I would point out that EMC is one of the single greatest performing companies this decade, is a lion in the high-end, high-margin corporate storage segment, and should do well. Yet, you know what? EMC gets only a little more press and respect than NTAP. Bottom line, Storage is great, but not sexy. Fortunately, G & Kers get it; the Survey posted over the weekend and updated on Monday showed that EMC and NTAP are widely and heavily held by threadsters here. For DD, you should go to the EMC thread, and particularly review the infrequent but eloquent posts of Bill Fischofer. There will be references to NTAP, and the eventual collision as EMC moves down in to the mid-storage range occupied so ably by NTAP. stan

To: t36 who wrote (11714)	12/2/1999 6:07:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

t36, NTAP is a small company compared to the ones you mention, but it is very profitable (58% gross margin), dominates its space (Networked Attached Storage) (40+% share), is growing rapidly (90%/year), and owns intellectual property (ONTAP op sys, WAFL file system, SNAPSHOT file backup systems, Clustered Failover...) NTAP's Chairman of the Board is Don Valentine, ex-COB of CSCO. CFO of CSCO is also on NTAP's board. EMC is aware of NTAP now, as NTAP has a very high win rate against EMC (75%) even when EMC discounts heavily. NTAP's capacities are intersecting with EMC now. Suggest you look at NTAP's terrific web site for a lot of good information about their technology: netapp.com Galahad