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Laura Sanders, VP of IBM Tivoli Storage Software: Page 9 of 11

Byte and Switch: When you say certain vendors are "talking one way and delivering in another," are you referring to EMC or Veritas?

Sanders: [Pause] I was referring to a number of players. I think EMC is the clearest example in the industry – their WideSky initiative is like when Microsoft Corp. [Nasdaq: MSFT] tried to take over Java... I sure hope EMC will go support the SNIA [Storage Networking Industry Association] initiative for CIM [Common Information Model] standards, because the one thing we can't do is provision them... I hope they want to get there, because I do believe it's the best thing for the industry. But it's probably difficult to go from being a hardware company to being a hardware and software company.

Byte and Switch: Is that a gap – that you can't provision EMC storage?

Sanders: If a customer wakes up and their No. 1 priority is to provision an EMC box, yes, that's a gap. But one of the big shifts we're seeing is, the hardware vendor used to tell you what to do. Now the value is moving from the differentiation you can get from a piece of hardware, to the differentiation from software and services.

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