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

To: Bruce Brown who wrote (4398)	2/14/2002 4:24:49 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Still in that one, Bruce? 9/11 bounce was only 6% and TTM revenues slipped from $514M to $471M despite the massive sales push at CPQ and HWP designed to support the merger. That's non-recurring, obviously. Coupled with the risks associated with any first generation data center product -- in this case a latency-prone multi-stage switch competing against single stage incumbents -- the other players that trade around BRCD have lower risks and higher return potential.

To: Bruce Brown who wrote (4398)	2/14/2002 6:56:59 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

This is funny. BRCD's unique value add is a fabric RTOS in each SilkWorm model. This makes it easy to grow it into a large network and build software products around this RTOS. Also have standalone products (security, etc.). Software will become key differentiator with the expansion of SAN's. Competitor doesn't have an RTOS. Also have API's to extract info out of the switches. Used by Veritas in developing their products. BRCD value proposition with the software products is price/performance. Ability to offer perf. mgmt., fabric mgmt. provides beneficial options for end customer Fabric OS will become an aftermarket product that customers will take advantage of. I just listened to this part of the CC and Reyes is unequivocally lying about this one in the face of the fact that his installed base of 1Gbps switches can't even do simple hot code downloads. RTOS means Real-time Operating System. The RTOS takes care of such deterministic chores as fail-over, diagnostics and hot code downloads. This is a long-time standard feature of mainframe-class ESCON, FICON and Fibre Channel directors whose designs were heavily influenced by IBM and EMC which generally comply with standards such as MIL-STD. EMC, for example, does more than 25,000 hot code downloads a year as part of its well-regarded change management service offerings. McDATA has a 3rd or 4th generation RTOS developed over 5 generations of ESCON, FICON and FC directors. Inrange has a 2nd generation RTOS. With a track record validated over 5 generations of directors, McData is considered to have the most robust RTOS. That's why it's already generating more than 10% of revenues from its EFCM (homogeneous fabric management), FICON Server Manager (homogeneous fabric management) and SANavigator software (heteregeneous fabric management) products which all layer on top of their Viper RTOS. The fecal content of Brocade's claims can be easily confirmed by asking Brocade about the inability of their 1Gbps switches to perform simple hot code downloads. In fact, one of the most commonly reported reasons why Brocade lost market share during the last 4 quarters is that Global 2000 companies were faced the prospects of meshing 2Gbps switches that can do hot code downloads with 1Gbps switches that can't do hot code downloads so rather than expand in that direction of unnecessary complexity, they were moving to McDATA and Inrange directors and switches to simplify SAN deployments. That's also why some customers encouraged McDATA to buy SANavigator for $30M since it was further along in the process of developing software that can manage SANs with Brocade and McDATA switches. My understanding is that this is the same group of customers who encouraged McDATA to create a splinter group of 5 switch vendors within the EMC-led FibreAlliance in order to force Brocade to interoperate with the other switch vendors. The reason Brocade is outright lying about this one in the face of easily verifiable facts is that they are heavily touting fabric services that depend heavily on the RTOS which serves as the foundation. Their entire software strategy collapses once the street finds out that they are piling on untested software layers on top of an untested foundation. The necessary fiction or the unequivocal lie. You decide, but look at the way they have kept on stringing the most gullible sellside analysts about the 12000 for several quarters now. To get the idea of the technical barriers to entry in writing the microcode for the RTOS, take a look at the companies with greater resources which have failed repeatedly at similar tasks. Writing the storage systems' software, or "microcode," which enables the devices to connect to so many different servers, is a difficult task, Hill said. Ceating mainframe microcode that also applies to the open systems arena is extremely difficult. For example, StorageTek's Iceberg, a good product now being sold by IBM, was delayed for more than two years because of microcode difficulties." news.com.com This is the type of vendor hyperbole that explains why many data center products actually have official policies about not using version 1.0 products except those from the most trusted vendors that generally aim for platform stability before piling on dynamic features. And Brocade, which already has a rep for being difficult to interoperate with because of its pretensions of being the next Cisco, expects to waltz into data centers undergoing consolidation with that type of immature product? That, my friend, would be an unprecedented feat of salesmanship with no margin for error.<g>