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

To: riposte who wrote (9923)	2/13/2002 12:40:42 PM
From: JakeStraw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

>>In other words, the Network Appliances and EMCs of this world can forever kiss their comfy margins >>goodbye. Wow, pretty strong statement. I mean, it certainly wouldn't surprise me...

To: riposte who wrote (9923)	2/13/2002 1:39:19 PM
From: pirate_200	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

> Interesting article in InfoWorld...watch out for Microsoft. One of the biggest areas NTAP currently attacks is "NT consolidation". This is where a NTAP box or boxes replaces tens to hundreds of NT data servers. There's two conclusions you can draw from that: 1. NT, the flagship operating system for Microsoft in the enterprise is not working well as a data server. Microsoft has poured millions into NT and it hasn't helped. 2. If Microsoft didn't get NT right after all these years, what is the likelihood that they can produce a simple, reliable, scalable system like NTAP's and be willing to attack their own software and license stream of NT? The conference call yesterday said it all I think: competition that doesn't include tightly integrated hardware - i.e. a total system built from the ground up as a data appliance - is not going to be successful against NTAP. Unless Microsoft is willing to build hardware or find someone to build it for them and be willing to eat into their own NT business in the enterprise, they won't succeed. See Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" for a great discussion of this problem. Microsoft also has to produce better software, something that I have never seen them do. Microsoft might eat into Veritas' business because they are also trying to sell NAS-in-the-box software but also are not selling an integrated hardware solution, only software. Microsoft might be able to partner with Maxtor or others and hit the desktop or small office/home office environment, but I think that's about it. BTW: as to other competition - we haven't heard much out of George Gilder's "Blue Arc". Here was a company that was going to "revolutionize" storage moving to silicon and apparently, they can't seem to get the thing to perform well enough to release any SPEC file system benchmark numbers - SPEC SFS. Sun is on the third or fourth revision to their strategy and is still trying to live up to their claim of "eating NTAP's lunch". EMC is on their second NAS server, the IP-4700. EMC said it was the "NTAP killer" - a year later, which company looks closer to "death"? Everyone thinks producing a data appliance is easy, history shows it isn't so.