Zerowait Corporation

Cyberwar fiction and reality.

A lot of folks have been writing about the situation in Estonia. I think the graphic above pretty much sums up the situation. People are real concerned about the security of their data, but what happens when your data becomes completely unavailable to your worldwide sales and accounting staff?
Denial of Service software that is easy to get and easy to use, it sounds like the business & world economy may be in for some rough times ahead now that we are all wed to the internet.

Which way is NetApp going to sell more product through its resellers? Will threats increase sales more than sales incentives? Won’t sales incentives merely be passed through as lower prices to customers anyway?

NetApp’s CEO said that he wants Resellers to concentrate on NetApp and not any other products.
Solution providers who do not take advantage of NetApp run the risk of being left behind as that company continues to grow rapidly, Warmenhoven said. “If that doesn’t happen, you will be a less significant partner of ours,” he said last week. “Let’s scale together.”

But the worlwide sales manager said that they will work with Resellers who sell other products without any issues as long as it is to displace a competitors products.

“If the partners sells us and Hitachi Data Systems, we don’t want them to drop Hitachi,” Iventosch said. “We talk about what it will take to take out EMC in an account. Or if the partner sells NetApp and EMC, we’ll talk about how to take out HDS. What we don’t want to do is go to a partner with a significant business and do share-shifting.”

Does NetApp want it both ways? Is what is good for NetApp good for Resellers? What is the best long term strategy for Reseller integrators and their end user customers? I doubt that short term sales incentives will ever be the best thing for end users, although it will produce lower prices.

The best solution for a NetApp customer who is looking for a new storage solution remains to call both NetApp and IBM and get competitive quotes. Sometimes NetApp salesman partner with a reseller for a sale, which means a customer can typically get a better price out of the IBM sales person, because there are less hands in the profit pie . Sometimes the NetApp salesperson and the IBM sales force partner, so getting different corporate divisions in different states to ask for similar systems can also produce large price differences, because of the way NetApp registers sales opportunities and different sales people are getting different sales incentives. If you are buying new NetApp storage – you should certainly get multiple quotes.

Another holiday weekend of catching up.

Reading the reports of NetApp’s sales problems you would think that the storage industy was in a slump. But Zerowait’s service and support contracts for NetApp legacy equipment continue to grow. There are a number of reasons for this, but most of them come down to an analysis by each individual customer that buying new NetApp equipment can’t be price justified by the nominal increase in storage performance that buying new equipment from NetApp will provide them.

Additionally, many NetApp Nearstore (R100, R150, R200) customers are coming to Zerowait for service and support because NetApp’s support prices are so high.

So when stock analysts say things like this:

“Though we subscribe to NetApp’s macro-economic commentary, and our checks do coincide with company comments that an upward trend took place in April, we believe competitors will question whether competitive headwinds are incrementally surfacing for NetApp,” said A.G. Edwards analyst Aaron Rakers, in a guidance note released today.

From our viewpoint the problems with NetApp’s hardware sales have more to do with a lack of innovation and performance to justify the cost of their new equipment. Customers may be asking ” Why not just keep the old equipment running and invest our money in our engineering staff” The enterprise storage market continues to commoditize, can NetApp compete in this market over the long term? Only time will tell.

Unlike NetApp, our business is booming & and our future is brilliant, so we will be catching up this weekend!

Are NetApp sales slumping because of their customers perception of a steady decline in customer service and support or because of slumping overall slumping IT spending?

SAN FRANCISCO, May 23 (Reuters) – Network Appliance Inc.’s (NTAP.O: Quote, Profile , Research) chief executive said lower demand for its products by U.S. corporations was hurting sales, leading the data network storage maker to forecast declining sequential revenue.

“We saw a slowdown in information-technology spending in U.S. enterprise accounts,” CEO Dan Warmenhoven said in an interview after the company reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday. “We’re not confident that we are back in a normal spending pattern.”

HP seems to be upbeat on server sales, If HP’s server sales are growing – why would storage sales be slumping for NetApp?

H-P’s results, attributed to strong sales of personal computers and server-computers, had been preannounced earlier this month

Information Technology is a complex marketplace, and we are seeing two very different views of corporate IT spending patterns here.

Is new NetApp equipment more of a maintenance and support hog than Isilon?
According to this Wall Street Journal Article it might be.

For some companies, buying tech gear from a start-up is a first. Geophysical mapping firm Arcis Corp., for one, has always purchased its technology from big tech firms. But last year, it chose start-up Isilon, a Seattle-based network-storage company, to help improve how it stores and processes two-dimensional and three-dimensional images. Arcis, in Calgary, Canada, captures and analyzes images below the Earth’s surface for oil and gas exploration. Over the years, the amount and size of data the company analyzed grew until it became difficult to maintain.

Arcis initially examined gear from large companies such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and Network Appliance Inc., which both visited and conducted hour-long presentations about their equipment. But the products would have required Arcis to hire more information-technology personnel for maintenance. In contrast, Isilon’s system was newer and didn’t require much maintenance. “Their [Isilon’s] technology was more innovative than all the other things we had seen, so we took a leap of faith,” says Rob Howey, who oversees data processing for Arcis.

Many of Zerowait’s customers have chosen to maintain and upgrade their NetApp storage using our service, support and parts upgrades. I wonder what were the people and performance factors that Arcis used in its evaluation of their different storage options. Did Arcis evaluate upgrading their NetApp using third party service and support? How much more efficient is Isilon then NetApp and where did Arcis go to get reliable comparison figures? Where can anyone go to find a formula that objectively evaluates Personnel, Price, Performance, and Power consumption for a storage subsytem?

Remote monitoring for the dispatch and deployment of parts and people.

Over the past few months the Zerowait staff has been very busy working on our ASP solution for remote monitoring. Remote monitoring and parts replacement has become more important as companies around the world are attempting to manage complex infrastructures built out of emerging technologies. As the number of discrete component parts increase each of these parts may become another single point of failure – and becomes another part of the solution and the problem.

The product which we call the ZHA Exception Reporter grew out of our own requirements. But as more products are calling home, and networks get more complex some of our customers began to ask if we could monitor their products also. In the last few weeks companies suddenly seemed to realize that their products need to call home also, and our ZHA Exception Reporter is really affordable and adaptable to monitoring autosupport messages from almost any component.

And so the product is beginning to blossom. If you are interested in a remote monitoring solution please give us a call, we would love to talk to you about our new product. Give us a call at 888.811.0808 – you will be glad you did!

My week in the United Kingdom was very interesting. The problems customers there have when dealing with NetApp on data migrations, upgrades and licensing are very similar to those that are experienced by NetApp customers in the USA. The customers we met with had all thought that NetApp had a monopolist’s hold on parts, support and upgrades until the started working with Zerowait. One customer we met with checked with NetApp about transferable licensed filers, and much to the chagrin of his NetApp sales person found out that everything that we had been telling about transferable licensing was absolutely true.

Since most of Zerowait’s business is the support of NetApp legacy equipment, which they no longer support we can’t understand why they view us as competition. It was obvious to almost everyone I spoke with that NetApp makes money on Software support even if we provide the end user with hardware support. But NetApp is in the business of selling new disk drives, not maintaining support on older equipment or making older equipment more efficient. NetApp salesman on not paid commission on storage or energy efficiency but on selling more and bigger storage arrays.

When NetApp talks about how green they are, is it a statement of their salesman’s commission check, their customers budget savings, or how much energy they are saving with their new storage solution?

From The United Kingdom
Over the last few days I have been on a whirlwind tour of England visiting with our customers over here. I spent the last three days visiting customers in and around London, and tomorrow I will be visiting some customers up around Manchester. It has been a great trip so far, and everyone has been extremely friendly, and is interested in our legacy services and support for NetApp equipment. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the transferability of licenses and many of the people we met with have been given misinformation on license transferability, I tried to clear the issues up as much as I could. A lot of the folks I met with this week work for the European division of companies in the US that we already do business with. It was great to hear in person how they had heard about us and how happy they have been with our service and support.

Up until this trip I thought the most confusing street signs were in the city of Boston, however I think London is clearly tied for confusing building numbers and street signs. By the way, I recommend the Dog and Duck for some beers with customers and then a trip down the street to GoPal for some Indian food.

The Transportation Security Administration is missing secure data.
The U.S. agency responsible for securing the nation’s airports says it can’t find an external hard drive packed with the personal records of about 100,000 current and former employees.

Authorities at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) noticed the drive missing late last week, but aren’t certain where it is. “It is unclear at this stage whether the device is still within headquarters or was stolen,” the agency said.

Assuming that the drive was in fact stolen — it went missing from what was called a “controlled area” at TSA headquarters in Washington D.C. — officials have asked the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service to investigate.

Better check your shoes!

Institutional Shareholder Services had some pretty strong words about Apple recently.

Read what they said about Apple

A resounding no-confidence vote

“The Apple board’s handling of the entire options imbroglio does not inspire investor confidence. The window into current and past compensation practices at the company provided by the board is best described as opaque. Instead the board has taken insufficient steps to assure investors that insiders will not profit from the favorable timing of equity grants. Such behavior sets an unacceptably low bar for corporate conduct at Apple, and in this age of heightened corporate scrutiny, it is critical that the board set the tone. Strong financial performance does not excuse such shortcomings regarding the oversight of grant timing. CEO Steve Jobs has been instrumental in creating significant shareholder value; however, a cult-like devotion to any CEO can be a huge downside risk to shareholders. The entire board, including Steve Jobs, needs to ensure that even superstar CEOs do not rule the empire.”

— Conclusion of Institutional Shareholder Services’ proxy analysis of Apple

Read the whole article.

I wonder what they think about the stock options games played by NetApp’s management ?

You can’t make this stuff up!