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

To: mauser96 who wrote (27071)	6/29/2000 3:05:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

Luke, NTAP faces a challenge as it has to transition from sales directly to technical customers to the next level of sales on the enterprise level. (as CTXS stockholders can attest, this can be tough) If both mangement teams aren't reading Inside the Tornado, they're doing themselves, their customers, their vendors and their shareholders a dis-service. --Mike Buckley

To: mauser96 who wrote (27071)	6/29/2000 4:31:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Thanks for the report Lucius. NTAP grew 80% 100% 110% 120% respectively each quarter last year. I wonder which number HQ is pointing to when it says "a declining quarterly growth rate next quarter compared to previous quarters". Kind of a safe prediction, eh? I certainly don't expect NTAP's 1Q numbers to exceed its FY2000 4Q numbers, but I do expect 1Q2001 to match the growth rate of 1Q2000 (80%). WRT to "NTAP faces a challenge as it has to transition from sales directly to technical customers to the next level of sales on the enterprise level." This is not the problem that CTXS is facing. CTXS is moving from an indirect sales model to a direct sales model (distributors/resellers to in-house sales force). NTAP did this transition way back in 1994-95. What NTAP is facing is a much easier problem: NTAP has been able to focus on the IT department, even as low as Sys Admin, to sell filers. It was a "technical sale". As NTAP scalability moves up, NTAP must sell at a higher level--the CIO or higher because the bucks are bigger and the impact on the enterprise is more visible. I do not see NTAP having problems doing this. In fact, NTAP has been doing this quite sucessfully. It will just need to do more of it. The leadership is there to make this happen. One repercussion of this moving up the food chain in the enterprise is that the sales cycles will lengthen. NTAP already has a knack for giving its prospects "incentives" to buy sooner. (That comes with a high margin product.) This problem will require good sales management.