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

To: DownSouth who wrote (4508)	9/21/2000 8:24:56 AM
From: bob gauthier	Respond to of 10934

Somewhat meatless article found in InternetWeek today: Storage Gets Sensible It's been one of the louder debates raging for the last couple of years among vendors of servers, RAID products and Fibre Channel switches. Network attached storage or storage area network? NAS vs. SANs. Which to buy? May the best price point for gigabyte and terabyte capacity win. IT managers are using whatever makes the most sense in a given part of the enterprise. Sometimes, it's a matter of reacting promptly to an urgent requirement, driven in turn by storage-intensive apps that won't wait for a full-blown ROI study. Pragmatism is the order of the day as IT managers implement SANs and NAS in the same enterprise. Vendor black and white usually gives way to the customer's gray areas. Storage purchases, long on a steep growth curve, are projected to continue on that same trajectory during the next few years. IDC estimates that 400,000 terabytes of storage capacity will be sold this year, more than tripling to 1.3 million terabytes by 2002. That's a lot of bits and tape libraries and RAID assemblies. It's also a sizable piece of IT's budget and is growing annually. Dataquest projects the cost per megabyte of storage this year to be roughly 15 cents, a price that could fall to as little as three cents per megabyte in three years.--Terry Sweeney

To: DownSouth who wrote (4508)	9/21/2000 9:42:06 AM
From: John F Beule	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

From 'RedHerring': redherring.com MANAGEMENT METER If you think about the most well-managed companies in technology, they have been constantly underestimated over the years because traditional accounting methods have discounted the hidden value of their superior management. Think about Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO). How many times during the company's lifetime have we heard the valuation curmudgeons moan about the overvalued price/earnings ratio on Cisco's stock? Well, Cisco's management team and well-oiled acquisition machine has consistently proven traditional assessments wrong. It is now one of the three most highly valued companies in the world. This, of course, leads to a whole new set of questions about the company's leadership, but it is Cisco's management team and acquisitions prowess that have accounted for the premium on the stock, not some kind of misguided investor bubble. Baruch Lev, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Management, has studied this theory extensively, and he has come up with a term for it that Trilogy has borrowed in creating a methodology to value its investments: "knowledge capital." Using the knowledge capital concept, Trilogy analysts such as Mr. Desautels actually cook up numbers and assign a value to knowledge capital, which includes items such as the management team, the quality and number of patents and technology, and the skill of the engineering team. For example, Trilogy has pegged Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s knowledge capital value as $210.9 billion. That's $210.9 billion in value that would be largely ignored by traditional accounting. Cisco's knowledge capital is valued at $105.4 billion, and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC)'s knowledge capital is valued at $170.5 billion. The valuation curmudgeons have constantly missed the boat on emerging market leaders that were considered overvalued by conventional means. Some examples in just the past two years include Juniper Networks (Nasdaq: JNPR) and Brocade Communications Systems (Nasdaq: BRCD). These companies were often cited as being overvalued, with this column being one of the offenders. The people who dug down deep into the market, got to know how powerful each of these players was in its emerging market, and understood the knowledge capital embedded in the organization could have identified this value. Was there ever a time to get them at the right price? That's always hard to nail down -- but buying such companies on the dips over time has been a golden strategy. So, under this premise, what is Trilogy holding? Mr. Desautels still believes storage and networking technologies hold promise for the long term. Some of the long-term core holdings of his fund, identified through these valuation methods, include Brocade, EMC (NYSE: EMC), Network Appliance (Nasdaq: NTAP), Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT), Juniper, and JDS Uniphase (Nasdaq: JDSU).