How do you feel ? Do you feel confident ? Wary ? Disillusioned ?
7 replies (most recent on top)
My moral is great! Of course I no longer work at NetCrap lol
Just dropped all my NetApp branded backpacks, coolers, shirts and jackets off at the homeless shelter down from one of NetApp's biggest competitors downtown, Made me feel better.
NetApp taking a lead in the market? What market would that be, the layoff market? They're definitely making a good run at that... As far as other markets go what plan to lead any markets are you aware of? Just saying the word transformation doesn't result in new products and innovation. Growing through acquisition rarely works and usually fails miserably. A shrinking top line can only go on so far, unless you happen to be IBM!
@1jus the results over the last year are pretty abysmal in context. NTAP beat earnings one quarter, but it's still down year over year. Income was down 4% and total revenue was down 7% from the prior year. Cloud providers and the cheap availability of broadband have made storage a commodity. In less than ten years this industry will be in hard decline. If NetApp is still focusing their innovation efforts on yesterday's hot trends, they will decline with it.
Hopeful. If you'd asked me before GK came on board I'd have said there is no way to recover from stupidity. Looking at the results and progress over the past year and off-loading of massive stupidity, I think NetApp has as good a shot and maybe better than competitors at taking a lead in the market.
I feel sorry for netapp...they try so hard to patch a sinking ship...mainly by throwing the crew overboard as of late.
For many years cloud providers were growing, but the fools kept their mentality 'what customers really want are flexible filers.' So they kept focus on providing filers and the best cloud strategy they had was 'well people will still buy filers.' They created CDOT which was initially a complicated buggy mess (now it has matured somewhat). Hardware in the last 5 years has been 'fast enough' and aging platforms are still usable today...meaning customers don't really need to upgrade other than being forced into it. Worse yet there was no upgrade path to CDOT other than migration...giving customers a second chance to think 'do we really want to continue to buy filers or do something else?'
As years past, storage became a cheap commodity and sales decline because customers actually want more than just filers. The trend became a tiny market wants all flash local storage for faster performance because the cloud is too slow...or large companies can't move everything to cloud and do require some local storage. Netapp wanted to sell itself as a partner to customers who were already moving on (how ridiculous is that?). Nonetheless, the market continued to shrink, not growing. Other storage providers were bought because they just couldn't grow anymore.
Only recently has netapp realized that customers want more than just filers and they have to do something to compete. So they are hopeful that all flash will sell to large cloud providers (solidfire type of product) and become market leader. In the meantime, they'll try sell filers to a declining market against competition that gladly sells a cheaper (perhaps inferior) product.
I can't blame the current leadership. The problem is deeper and they are scrambling to fix something that started many years ago. The 'transformation' was never supposed to happen if the previous liberals in charge cared more or actually new what they were doing. Any dummy could do a google search many years ago to figure out the netapp leadership was clueless...however at the time it didn't matter because customers were scrambling to buy filers. Its all flipped around today.
End of the day, I think netapp is on the right track, but its unfortunate they had to be kicked in the face first. Perhaps its too late, but if they can pull it off, investors will be really happy. I'd caution buyers though... very high risk stock...so many better wants to invest your money.
Yup, Disillusioned, disgusted, disengaged...all those dis's