Caching appliance vendor CacheFlow Inc doesn’t appear to be on Network Appliance Inc’s radar, even though it clearly sees the filer specialist as clear competition in its market. Although sales of Network Appliance’s NetCache product were flat at 8% of its $91m revenue last quarter ($7.3m), the company says units increased 20%. Reportedly 30% of those units went to corporate applications. Network Appliance told Merrill Lynch & Co that in the caching market it has seen Novell Inc only twice in recent deals, a surprisingly small number given Novell’s NLANR benchmark performance and their common corporate target market. Inktomi is its constant competitor. It notes caching has been slow to take off in the US which it attributes to the lower cost of bandwidth.
