Mr. Montague: We focus on system area networks. Over the past decade, technology has enabled the networking of I/O technology. We believe this is a fundamental shift in the enterprise computing architecture. Now data center managers scale the data storage and computing aspects of their data center independently and gain new levels of control over their environment, all from a network-centric strategy. We are currently focused on the rapid growth in data generation and the intense pressure on data management costs. Our public stock coverage includes a broad range of companies impacted by our system network view, including the larger storage subsystem vendors, system networking (SAN) players, and data management leaders. Within the SAN companies, we include switch vendors such as McDATA (MCDT) and Brocade (BRCD), the host bus adapter (HBA) vendors such as Emulex (ELX) and Qlogic (QLGC), transceiver vendor Finisar (FNSR), emerging iSCSI vendor Adaptec (ADPT), and Crossroads (CRDS), a SCSI router manufacturer. We co-cover the public data management software players, Veritas (VRTS) and Legato (LGTO), with RBC Capital Markets Analyst Sarah Mattson. Finally, as our theme is heavily driven by the storage subsystem vendors, we cover EMC (EMC) and Network Appliance (NTAP). So we have a very broad spectrum with a common underlying theme.
TWST: What's transpired in the area from a business point of view
over the past year or so? How has this business been impacted by
the sluggish economy?
Mr. Denegri: In this economy there is a more intense focus placed
on capacity/asset utilization ' 'getting more out of less' as it
relates to existing storage or new product processes and
capabilities. We have seen a more intense focus on the networking
of storage in order to maximize that utilization. So actually the
storage networking hardware group has been somewhat buffered from
this weaker economy due to a very positive, measurable return on
investment. We have actually seen this group continue to grow and
expand recently, despite the economy. We also continue to see
capacity of storage grow at a very strong rate, despite the fact
that pricing per megabyte of storage has fallen. So we would say
that the leaders in the group are actually seeing a benefit in
this economic environment.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ADPT, BRCD, CRDS, CSCO, DELL, ELX, EMC, FNSR, HBA, HPQ, IBM, INTC, LGTO, MCDT, MOT, MSFT, NTAP, QLGC, SAN, SUNW, VRTS
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