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Technology Stocks : DSS: DLT finally open for trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dr_elis who wrote (329)	10/25/2000 12:46:36 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 488

Michael, I was out last night until 1 AM, then on the go from 7 AM this morning until just now. I'll listen to it tonight, will post comments if any are worth posting (I would guess that there must be, especially given the spinoff news). It is impossible to know w/o listening to the CC what to make of the tank today--Naz is getting killed, could be general market stuff, plus weaker DLT sales. The latter was expected by me--this transition has been tough. I'd look for one more tough quarter, then rising sales thereafter when SDLT (especially the backward compatible version) gets untracked. I look for a good year (finally!) next year in the market for DSS. Should be some pent up demand for both drives and libraries, as well as a boost from Snap, presuming as I do that their sales will be hot. All (should I bother even to say it?) IM[very]HO. Sam

To: dr_elis who wrote (329)	10/26/2000 8:28:16 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 488

Well, I listened to the CC. Don't have much time this morning, but will post more notes tonight, if I find anything not in the press release worth reporting. For now, a f couple of highlights that haven't been publicly noted yet: they said that they had purchased about 3 million shares last Q for between $35 and 36 million. They have about $130m left to buy shares, and would use that up over the next three quarters. They generated $97 million in cash last Q, not a bad number. They said they could say nothing about Snap that hasn't already been said, even though a couple of analysts tried to at least get revenue numbers from them. However, I can say that Meridian, in their last reporting quarter, had something like $3 or $3.5 million of revenue. I think all of that was from Snap, and it was a year ago. So if revenues grew tenfold Y-Y, which was one of the two things that magically they thought they could say about Snap sales (the other was that revenue increased 50% sequentially), then revenue was between $30 and $35 million, not a shabby number at all, in fact those are NTAP numbers, and we all know what kind of stock NTAP is. They did note what has been noted on SI before, that Snap is on Dell's front Web page, and has been so since their partnership was announced. The plug and play nature of the product plays very nicely into Dell's distribution strengths. They are also seeing more volume orders of the Snap servers, especially the 4000 (I guess they said more than two facts--but not much more!). One thing I found interesting was that they are partnering with NTAP on a gigabyte ethernet product, as well as an FC SAN product, both of which may have been partially responsible for having the spinoff happen now. If Snap keeps increasing the capacities of their servers, eventually they will have to run into NTAP's space. This won't happen anytime soon, but they may as well take care of the possible conflict now. BTW, the drop yesterday wasn't surprising, especially given the market, but also the dearth of info on Snap. It may be a pretty hot offering, if the market climate is still ripe for hot offerings. I am (cautiously) very optimistic about both stocks for the next year. More later. Sam