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

To: DownSouth who wrote (2053)	1/12/2000 1:50:00 PM
From: dwayanu	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 10934

[Dway] ...filer equivalents...theoretically...competitor with a lot of money and a couple of years [DS] Gotta take serious exception to that...the speed, reliability and simplicity of NTAP's filers... ...are simply not available from anyone else. Agree, no serious competitors, including EMC IMO, now or on the horizon. But, there's no proprietary concept here AFAIK, and there's nothing magic about the drives or front end or OS or utilities. What one group can develop, so can another, given time and money. I don't think it's likely that any competitor will appear in the next couple of years, but if some big company thinks the NAS market is big enough, they have the ability (read 'money') IMO to develop filer et al equivalents. Keep in mind that a competitor could simply copy NTAP's business model and largely copy the hardware and software conceptual architecture to give themselves a running start. For example, NTAP hardware designers are (I assume) well paid, but who is inhuman enough not to jump ship if someone offers them a couple hundred K a year plus big stock options? - Dway

To: DownSouth who wrote (2053)	1/12/2000 6:33:00 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

>> NTAP's proprietary OS (ONTAP) and proprietary method of storing and retrieving data (WAFL). SNAPSHOT/SNAPRESTORE are also proprietary and minimize the effort required for users to save/restore files. Now the BIG question: Does ntap license their proprietary software? If so, ontap and wafl could become the sector standards, in which case ntap would become a Gorilla, like Qualcomm. If not, ntap's power may be limited to King in a Royalty game, or Chimp if another software approach becomes the sector's standard (a la the Apple fiasco). uf