Koch: No, I don't think that's the issue with EMC. Like all OEMs, they have a lot of demands placed on their labs, but again they find the time to work with us. Their objective, I think and this has evolved over time is to support the industry in general and be supportive of a variety of players. Clearly, with their relationship with McData, their primary focus has been to sell essentially a turnkey SAN with their Symms and Connetrix, which is the McData product. Over time, as they migrate to more open standards and open management protocols and they see customers preferring the Inrange fabric because of what it offers to customers, they will continue to support us and will, I think, be more active in supporting us.
Byte and Switch: Sun Microsystems Inc. [Nasdaq: SUNW] recently dropped Inrange as a supplier. What has happened with that relationship? [Ed. note: Inrange says it has never had a reseller agreement directly with Sun. Rather, according to Inrange, Sun put its director on the Sun price list via Inrange's agreement with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), which supplies Sun with its high-end Lightning storage arrays.]
Koch: The issue for Sun has been in contrast to EMC to limit the number of platforms and service models they were going to support. When we were late to market, as they perceived it, with 2 Gig, it made their decision [to drop Inrange's FC/9000 from its price list] that much easier. I've met with Sun and we do a lot of business with Sun. Most of it comes through their Sun Professional Services side of the business, but also they have an internal win room, a program to support something that's not on the Sun price book. We do a fair bit of volume in that win room. On the storage side, we are qualified with HDS, and Sun OEMs its high-end storage from HDS. We see this as a relatively simple qualification process, and I think there is some appeal with Sun because we have 2-Gig now and the most flexible, scaleable FC director on the market.
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