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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (2428)	11/9/2000 10:37:05 PM
From: trendmastr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

AEA Diary II 08-Nov-00 17:22 ET [BRIEFING.COM - Gregory A. Jones] Day two of the AEA conference offered the opportunity to see eight more companies. If that wasn't information overload, last night's vote count surely was. Because of that (ongoing) exercise in democracy, we were a bit late in getting this piece done. Apologies for tardiness, and let's get underway. As was the case yesterday, these will just be my personal observations of the presentations I saw, and generally do not reflect any depth of research. For the most part, I knew little about the companies I saw ahead of the presentations. These are initial reactions to the companies' presentations. Emulex (EMLX) * Turnout was pretty good for an early morning blast of fibre channel. Though I'm familiar with fibre channel storage area networks (SANs) from my research on Brocade (BRCD), I had never looked closely at the fibre channel host bus adapter companies. That's Emulex, as well as competitors such as JNI (JNIC) and QLogic (QLGC). * Emulex has the biggest market share in FC host bus adapters, but as with Brocade, which owns a huge chunk of the FC switch market, the question isn't so much how you're doing in FC, but whether or not FC is the future. When I asked CEO Paul Folino that question, his response was the same as that of Brocade CEO Greg Reyes -- if the market shifts away from FC, we'll transition into the new technology, whether it's storage over IP (SoIP) or Infiniband or whatever. * I relayed that thinking to a buy-side friend who replied "transitions are never as easy as you think they'll be." Well said. We recommended taking profits on Brocade recently, due both to its extreme valuation and this ongoing FC/SoIP battle, and for the same reason Emulex scares me a bit, but I'll take a closer look when I get home. * One interesting note: Emulex claimed that the QLogic acquisition of switch-maker Ancor has actually benefitted Emulex, as it has resulted in an even closer relationship with Ancor's competitors (and Emulex customers); most notably Brocade.