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Tom Sweeney, President, CEO, and Chairman, ManagedStorage International: Page 10 of 11

Byte and Switch: Sounds great. But what about companies like AmeriVault Corp., Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc., EVault Inc., or LiveVault Corp.?

Sweeney: Arsenal is one of the more pure competitors of ours. They're a provider inside AT&T data centers, for example. In our view, they have not created as broad an offering in terms of being able to service enterprise clients' dedicated and shared assets or assets customers own themselves. And we've been in Europe ahead of them, even though they have announced they're going there. We've been hearing they're doing reasonably well.

AmeriVault and the rest are backup-and-restore providers. We cost less but haven't dedicated the sales resources to sell that directly, where their model is. Our enterprise contracts are typically for $15,000 to $100,000 a month.

[Ed note: According to Kevin Thomas, a spokesman for MSI, small-to-medium-sized businesses typically pay between $300 and $3,000 a month for the kind of backup-and-restore services Sweeney refers to here.]

Once we introduce enterprise services, we will have some places where we compete with larger systems integrators. But I think we compete in a better way. We're willing to carve off a portion of operations of the business, data protection infrastructure, where it makes a lot of sense to offer a compelling service. We guarantee the work we do and we have SLAs [service level agreements] for everything. We also guarantee the price we work at: The scale goes down as volume goes up.