The Station just got back from an eye-opening sit-down interview in Sunnyvale with NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven. Warmenhoven, finishing his 13th year as CEO at the company (an eternity in some circles), is a polished, veteran exec who offered some keen insight into his company’s place in the market, the competition, trends in the storage industry and what he sees as major advancements to come in data storage.
The Station was careful not to be too pushy on the subject of Sun Microsystems, whose lawyers filed a couple of counter lawsuits this week against NetApp in a dispute over file system intellectual property. Corporate legal matters, as one might imagine, are touchy — especially when the litigation is in process, and people involved often pass when asked about them.
Nonetheless, part of the conversation went like this:
The Station: “I wasn’t planning to ask you about Sun right now.”
Warmenhoven: “Sun? Well, what about it?”
The Station: “I love this blog war thing, with [Sun CEO] Jonathan [Schwartz] saying something, and then Dave [Hitz, co-founder of NetApp] coming back with his side of it … it’s so ‘new media’ …”
Warmenhoven: “The problem is, Jonathan’s are just full of lies.”
(Ack! To be continued.)
The Station has it right here on the record. Warmenhoven’s remark might seem harsh, but Schwartz has been equally as opinionated. I’m forever fascinated with the love-hate relationships between companies here in SillyCon Valley; the fact that companies can partner, say, on data center packages (The Station abhors the term “solution”), and then turn around and go to court over a storage file system IP disagreement.
This certainly lends itself to more than a mere blog item, for sure; the entire Q&A will be published soon in eWEEK.com and eWEEK, the “book,” as we call it. It’s all good stuff, so stay tuned.
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Teradata Corp. of Dayton, Ohio, the world’s largest company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics, Oct. 30 reported revenue of $439 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30 — a 17 percent increase from its 2006 third quarter revenue of $375 million. Nice work.