Leisman: Well, the software people were elated, because they had been sitting over here in a corner, right? So they were ecstatic, because all of a sudden they had been validated... It was a scary place. Most people thought this place was going to shut down, you know.
Byte and Switch: You guys may have managed to stay afloat, but a lot of your competitors went under. What do you think you've done differently from, say, StorageNetworks?
Leisman: Well, I think the challenge for those guys was that they did have a couple large customers, but I think they forced themselves into a more evolutionary approach of "This is Plan A, and this is Plan B." We took a more radical approach in the sense that we said, "Hey, we're going to stop doing this now. And all the people associated with the services, we're going to move them to other companies, and we're going to go software..." I think you have to do that. Some companies can't handle the focus issues of multiple business models... Focus is a good thing in any company, big or small, but for a small company, it's a life-threatening issue... Just keeping the focus on. We were very, very clear on that.
Byte and Switch: Do you think there's any chance that the SSP market will ever come back?
Leisman: Sure. But it's going to be grid computing, utility computing. It's going to be a bigger thing, right? So it's going to be global services, media, some turnkey business processes, something like that. But it's not just going to be this little storage thing that's disconnected from everything we just talked about, right? So I think it's an absolutely important part of any service offering. I just don't think storage carved out as a separate thing makes any sense, personally.
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