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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eleder2020 who wrote (27047)	5/19/2000 4:03:00 AM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29386

SOFTWARE and it's IMPORTANCE is on CENTER STAGE at this CONFERENCE and in this PHASE of STORAGE NETWORK development and it is crucial to the SUCCESS and LONGEVITY and FUTURE RAMP of the SANS- So you tech PEOPLE-TELL US WHERE WE ARE HEADED? Thanks Ed for the great report. Affirmation that we've got most of the critical issues in hand is gratifying. With all due acknowledgement to Technocrat, the management software side of the SAN market is an aspect infrequently touched upon here. I think your emphatic CAPS are urging us on a "hunt." In fact, several things in your report will be filling some free time for awhile. In the meantime, some perfunctory thoughts. In attempting to discern the coming development of NAS/SAN/MAN/WAN Device, OS and Protocol Independent Storage Management Software (The Holy Grail), taking some clues from where the storage management software industry is now might point a long way up the path. Dataquest in April declared EMC as the top vendor of storage management software. IBM/Tivoli dropped to the #2 spot, with a 17.3% market share, and CA was third with a 16.4% share. Rounding out the top five were Veritas Software (12.1%) and BMC Software (5.6%). NTAP wasn't included. It's Filer is more software than hardware and should have been counted. I didn't see market share numbers in their report but presumably they are the market leader in NAS. Both market leaders EMC and NTAP provide proprietary heterogeniety with qualified parts and OSes. As do all the storage software vendors. The bitch is that none of their software will work together, or not very well. In reality, true Open Standards can threaten the software vendors' existence. Their products are not designed to work together, and they don't want them to. Something about market share. The push for Standards is for device\driver interoperability to provide a common framework to lay their proprietary software on top of. It's tough enough to modulate the code without having to customize device code at the api. They want Plug n Obey. EMC ramrodding the Fibre Alliance is all about having MIB compliant devices to sell software for. The more the merrier. And if all the devices comply (i.e. adopt the standard), continued market dominance is sustainable. The OSFI plug fest was pitching their switch standard as one size fits all to the softwarer vendors. Mr. Reyes indeed missed the point when he said nobody would connect two different switches on the same SAN. In most cases, market leaders set the standards, but it is my opinion that BRCD took a bite from AAPL. Now they're spitting it out for NTAP. Yup, so it looks like a standards war, and storage management software that shines like the aforementioned Holy Grail will look like fruit jars without someone settling something. And soon. I expect that the storage management software market leaders will continue to lead their causes. Also, Dataquest analyst Carolyn DiCenzo predicts further consolidation in the storage management software market. However, she sees opportunities for smaller vendors in the storage infrastructure, storage resource management and hierarchical storage management (HSM) categories. Some musings on Sun and Jiro later. Douglas