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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Allen Benn who wrote (9600)	5/8/2001 9:57:43 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

We shall see. Step back from the technology and look at the bigger picture. Everything is being driven by people productivity. The reason why the storage-centric paradigm is tearing the enterprise computing world apart and dethroning the central processor is entirely due to the need for staff productivity to keep pace with the explosive growth in storage. This is already the driving force in the enterprise space and will become overwhelmingly dominant over the next few years. The hardware cost is almost irrelevant--something that the "our box is cheaper" crowd still don't quite understand. The structures and architectures needed to manage petabytes relegate these factors to rounding errors. Server-attached storage is a dead end. Storage networks will dominate. In the enterprise space these will be leveraged to provide competitive advantage. In the midrange and small business space this will be outsourced to network storage providers like STOR and ASPs like USIX. Outsourced storage services, by the way, are what will more than fill the broadband pipes being constructed and make today's worries over "bandwidth gluts" look silly. WIND has many opportunities ahead of it, but I doubt if disrupting EMC and CSCO are among them.

To: Allen Benn who wrote (9600)	5/9/2001 4:58:54 PM
From: Knight	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Bill Fischofer said: EMC realized many years ago that the real challenge and opportunity is in storage management. In the enterprise space storage demand is growing at a mind-boggling pace. The net result is that either storage management productivity grows apace or else you're faced with doubling and redoubling the size of your IT staff every year. Even if you could find the people the staffing expense would be prohibitive. That's why EMC has invested and continues to invest a huge portion of their R&D budget in storage management software. I've preached this message for many years on the EMC thread but in the storage business there is only one metric which matters: How many Gb can be managed per IT staff person. By this metric EMC remains streets ahead of anyone else, which is why those who only focus on the boxes and their pricetags miss the bigger picture. To which you replied (in part): If computer device industry at large can combine important pieces of the puzzle in commodity form (iRAID, iNIC, iNP, and BSD Unix all within the framework of I2O), Dell-like OEMs will grab the low end of server appliance devices, including storage. The management software won’t be nearly as capable as EMC’s, but adequate given huge reductions in product costs. In time, management software available throughout the Linux/BSD Unix free source community, combined with proprietary developments, will be adequate for a growing number of companies. I agree with you. It appears that EMC may be facing the classic "disruptive innovation" as described in Clayton Christianson's The Innovator's Dilemma. In fact, in this case I think that competitive products in the near future might be not only cheaper than EMC's, but might also very quickly become as capable or more capable. The way I see this happening is via software from Veritas--the hands-down leader in storage management software. Over the last few years, Veritas has been growing steadily both in terms product functionality and financial strength. They have clearly beaten their competition in this space [which is mainly Legato, CA/Arcserve, and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (formerly known as ADSM)], and they are a pure software play. In a nutshell, I can see where: Veritas Software + Storage Hardware Built from Commodity Parts might very quickly equal or exceed the functionality of EMC at a lower cost--particularly in non-mainframe environments. If WIND can position themselves to get a piece of this, I'll be delighted. :-)