NetApps looking to put more pressure on rivals
Vendor keen to grab market share and revenue from EMC and HP with its new products and services
Network Appliance (NetApps) wants to steal market share and revenue from rivals EMC and Hewlett-Packard (HP) with the launch of two Fibre Attached Storage (FAS) products, and a range of high-end software and services.
The FAS6030 and FAS6070, part of NetApps’ high-end FAS6000 series, are aimed at the data-centre market and will go head-to-head with EMC’s Symmetrix range. NetApps also launched its enhanced NetApp Manageability Software family and a Fibre Channel SAN, along with two services: premium support services for the FAS6070, and rapid deployment services for storage implementation.
Paul Hargreaves, consulting systems engineer at NetApps, told CRN: “VARs will need some retraining, but not much. [The latest launches] gives them a larger NetApp kit-bag and matches the frame array that EMC and HP have in the enterprise space.”
Hargreaves added that NetApps is attempting to quickly increase its market share in the high-end space. Last year, an IDC storage software report saw NetApps sales leap by 61.1 per cent to $139m, together with a 4.8 per cent increase in its market share. The vendor attributed part of the growth to reseller sales, which grew by three per cent to 46 per cent of its total turnover (CRN, 20 June 2005).
“It would be nice to see an impact on EMC’s and HP’s turnover,” Hargreaves said. “We are allowing VARs to reach the highest plateau, and we are proving we can move on from the mid-range data-centre islands.”
However, Nigel Ghent, marketing director for UK and Ireland at EMC, said: “This won’t threaten our channel at the high end.”
Aidan Sloyan, group enterprise sales manager at storage distributor CMS Peripherals, told CRN: “NetApps needs to take on its competitors’ business to survive because there’s no new market to create. I assume NetApps believes it can do this, but all the vendors are doing this to each other in this space.”