Are you considering reselling Decru's DataFort encryption appliance technology through your OEM partnership with Network Appliance? We are evaluating this all the time. Our partnership with NetApp is off to a great start. We're having ongoing discussions about how to leverage each other's technology all the time.
You've tried to go to market with iSCSI in several iterations. What's your road map? We have it on our DS300 xSeries attached box. We also have iSCSI capabilities through our NetApp partnership. We're continuing to evaluate whether or not it has enterprise usability. Right now, the iSCSI market is pretty small and it's stayed pretty small. It continues to be predicted to grow really fast and yet it is still pretty small. However, it's pretty logical that it could be a viable alternative for customers in the future. It's a topic of discussion at every road map meeting we have in terms of our development. However, right now our course is the DS300 and its follow-ons and the NetApp [reseller agreement] primarily.
How has Microsoft's expansion into storage affected your plans? We're keeping an eye on this space. It's clearly a vendor we need to continue to partner with. Their road maps are not really clear to us yet. We had launched a product in the xSeries space, but we didn't see tremendous uptake there. It's clear they're more active in the storage community, but it's not really clear where they're going yet. We're certainly not dismissing them. I have a lot of competitors in this space and they're certainly on the radar screen. When Microsoft puts their mind to something, they get it done. We've seen more co-opetition this past year than I think we've seen in years. You just have to keep your eyes on who's your competitor and who's your partners, and sometimes they're the same company.
Where are you at with the development of an open-source storage management platform through Aperi? Have you added any new partners to the original eight? No. But I'm meeting with a potential partner [Thursday]. There's a lot of interest. There is another group, not the top five, but the next five, that are on the sidelines taking a wait-and-see approach. A bunch of us get it and a few people don't get it. They're not looking at it from the customer's point of view. They're looking at it from their point of view. I think enough pressure in the system will force them to look at it from the customer's point of view.
Does this preclude you from participating in SMI-S? No. But, this builds one common base that does the basic things a customer needs to get started, like discovery and what are the resources in your infrastructure. Then if you decide on EMC, that's cool. EMC should put their investment not on the base, but how do you optimize the management of EMC things. Or how do you optimize the management of Cisco switches, or Brocade or HP or [Hitachi Data Systems]. I think there's some good code that will be donated to this.