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Technology Stocks : Data General Corp. "dgn" -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rainwater who wrote (215)	4/9/1998 6:42:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 354

Two comments: DG has always been strong in the healthcare space. This has a lot to do with historical alliances with one of the dominant hospital information systems (HIS) software developers, Meditech. Meditech was/is highly proprietory and runs on only DG and Digital. By far the largest number of sites on are on DG. DG did a very good job at exploiting, in a nice way, the relationship with Meditech. Consequently they are very well known in the HIS market. Columbia (HMO) I think is their biggest customer, and that one is a real big one... DG's healthcare unit is probably the best at "marketing". They understand that industry well and have a good team of people that know everyone. They participate in key events and they've proven that they can land big accounts. In the OEM storage business I think DG also does well, but the customer list is much smaller. HP, ICL, Unisys (I think), now Dell, etc. You know, the big hardware vendors. Don't need much in the way of "marketing" for that. In the end-user storage business I think they are behind, but probably not much behind any of the others. CLARiiON is run as a seperate division, has seperate sales people etc. I'm sure there is a lot of informal sharing of information between the regular DG sales force and the CBU (CLARiioN Business UNIT) folks. If you were to ask 2000 large site IT managers who the leaders are in storage products, I'm just not convinced that CLARiiON / DG would always be in the top 5 list (if indeed such an IT manager could even name 5 companies) -- and that problem is one of marketing and perception not one of products. DG's products have always been pretty darn good. Marketing has always been pretty sloppy. They don't have deep pockets for marketing -- you won't see them compete in the trade rags with the likes of Dell, Digital, Compaq etc. Trade events such as the one that you mention are pretty common technique for DG. One this specific to storage products is likely to draw the right target croud out. my 2 cents...