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

To: J Fieb who wrote (4158)	11/7/2001 9:36:40 PM
From: Gus	Respond to of 4808

They refreshed the hardware and that usually pleases those who worship the sun. They also added the HighGround SRM 5.0 management platform which gives them some heteregeneous credentials and decent technical vision, but not much of a competitive advantage, IMO. HighGround was a portfolio company of Egan-Managed Capital. One of the principals of Egan-Managed Capital is the son of EMC's co-founder who used to head EMC Sales and continues to sit on the EMC Board of Directors so EMC and many others were well aware of HighGround's technical vision. Frankly, I don't think the $400M HighGround acquisition gave them any truly differentiating technology. If I'm not mistaken, Egan-Managed Capital started funding HighGround's initial SRM products based on the Wintel platform right around the time that EMC started filing patent applications for key components of AutoIS that are swiftly making its way to the market through some of EMC's most popular software products. egancapital.com In any event, Sun's struggles in storage are similar to IBM. Not only does it have to keep up with EMC and HDS in terms of technology, it also has to wrestle with the major credibility problem created by the way it competes on too many levels -- storage platform, processor platform, operating system, middleware, and web services. Remember the old saying? Jack of all trades, Master of none, Simply ain't the one to be trusted with the corporate crown jewels -- corporate data. IBM finally decided to get out of the applications business when it saw that its different business units (servers, storage, operating systems, databases, middleware, services) were working at cross-purposes against each other and mucking up the IBM solutions message. Nobody wanted to buy IBM applications because they were too tied to DB2 or IBM AIX or VSS. As a result, IBM applications were starting to fall behind the popular applications from best of breed vendors like SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel and BEAS. Put simply, that deteriorating competitive position in applications was threatening to infect its other businesses. Sun's deal to resell HDS technology -- a major and, some would speculate, temporary concession for a company that pugnaciously prides itself on owning its own technology -- represented a tentative step towards that same kind of epiphany. Several bolts of lightning may still be required to get Sun to finally go on this journey from the conventional to the unconventional.<g>