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

To: Greg Hull who wrote (18719)	2/25/2000 5:02:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Greg, You've already taken me past my knowledge of FC or its switch market. I'm concerned that any further discussion of the specific market on my part will only lead to erronious conclusions. Actually, I'm convinced of it. :) I do have a couple comments that aren't specific to that market. If I understand you correctly, you're under the impression that if no tornado forms it becomes a royalty game. Not at all. If there is a battle going on between proprietary architectures, that in itself removes it from the realm of a royalty play. It's possible for the proprietary architectures to duke it out forever with no gorilla, but that doesn't make it a royalty game. You also made some astute observations in the form of questions about which tornado to watch for. The answer: all of them. Each product category might have its own tornado. Some tornados will help spawn other tornados. A good example would be that an enabling technology tornado might bring about an applications tornado that is dependent on that enabling tornado. Pick your product category and companies that are the most likely to benefit from the flurry of multiple tornados in an emerging space. Make sense? --Mike Buckley

To: Greg Hull who wrote (18719)	2/25/2000 8:06:00 PM
From: buck	Respond to of 54805

RE FC Switch market Allow to throw my 2 pesos worth in here: <<Why would the SAN companies say "I gotta have Brand X switch, and not that Brand Y switch"?>> The best reason I can think of is that their customers are demanding them. The second reason is market-proven interoperability. The third is that their installation engineers, the guys who HAVE to make it work to get paid, are more familiar with it's configuration interface (a la Cisco's IOS). <<The Fibre Channel tornado? In which case we should add a few more companies like Emulex and Q-Logic and others that buck wrote about>> I think this is the overall tornado. I don't think the tornado has started yet for any of the companies involved. I do believe that this FC stuff is in the bowling alley, as detailed in numerous posts. FC and SAN interest goes across the board. The closest thing to a niche I have found is film/video/broadcast, and that head pin is already knocked down. Others to follow are data service companies, like EDS & CSC. Again, I believe that this is a horizontal tornado (completely made up term) that covers industries. But I believe it will find it's niches. One that comes to mind immediately is ASPs, who need to save money on storage costs, like the EDS/CSC guys. Gotta run...the Princess is calling... buck