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Jeff Allen, Senior VP, Strategy & Development, BlueArc: Page 5 of 10

Allen: It has developed some great tools to identify where the bottlenecks are in the system, and we need to establish a value and pricing for this.

Byte and Switch: What’s the advantage to BlueArc of using resellers? And will they understand your technology?

Allen: Many organizations that look at new technology have what we call small business syndrome, which is a fear of small companies disappearing. VARs shield a lot of these concerns. Also, the NAS market is well populated with vendors, which means it’s not difficult for companies to expand with someone else’s product if they think you are going away. As far as understanding the product, we are looking for systems integrators and resellers that act as systems integrators, those who have been successful at selling products in the network storage space before – previous Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) resellers, for example, that don’t require us to teach them from scratch.

Byte and Switch: Remind us who BlueArc’s typical customers are.

Allen: We are strong in the high-performance market with post-production and editing sites that need to move large blocks of data around fast; and the same goes for the labs, Lawrence Livermore being the main one. As we grow, the challenge is getting new customers but also repeat business, which the Lawrence Livermore Labs deal demonstrates. But we need to expand into other spots we aren’t in, like healthcare, pharmaceutical, energy, oil and gas, and government. [See Livermore Labs Back for More BlueArc.]