Look at the following post from the Nortel thread. With scant reference to ASND, it clearly suggests reasons why Nortel would want to own the company.
Also, there are only 175 posts on the Nortel thread. I would suggest a perusal of the posts to see what acquisition talk has been posted there:
To: Perry (153 )
From: Andrew
Thursday, Sep 25 1997 12:52PM EST
Reply #154 of 175
No, I think this is new news. It's nice to see that there's no financing req'd this time. I
wonder if Lucent bowed out this time because their CDMA equipment costs too much
to produce for them to be competitive? Are they OEMing from Qualcomm or have
they done their own design I wonder? Anyways, nice to see Nortel in there with Sprint
again.
But what James is refering to is the central office telephony switching that was Nortel's
main bread-and-butter for years (and it's still a very big business for them). Over on
the Newbridge thread, we've been discussing NN's recent ATM wins that seem to
suggest that NN is taking a lot of central office switching contracts that ordinarily
would have gone to NT or LU in the pre-data days.
I wonder if NT can offer backbone ATM switching on the same scale that NN can
now that it's aligned with Seimens. Previously I had assumed that Nortel was THE
company in the world in the best position to do this. They are world leaders in both
WAN ATM and telephony switching. i.e. they are producing both NN and Seimens
type equipment in-house. I don't think even Lucent can say that, because they don't
seem to have much of an ATM presence. So who else better in the world to lead the
carriers through the data and telephony convergence via ATM?
Despite these advantages, it seems that the NN/Seimens alliance is eating their lunch at
the present. Even Canada's Stentor alliance (Bell Canada is the biggest member - and
Nortel's sister company) has chosen to put their entire backbone on NN/Seimens
equipment, as mentioned in the post James was refering to.
So what's the deal? Can Nortel fight back? No one seems to be noticing what in my
opinon are the true implications of these NN deals. NN was generally assumed to be
competing with Cisco, ASND/CSCC, etc. But a lot of what they're competing for is
the right to steal business that has been traditionally owned by NT and LU exclusively.
People seem to notice that NN is beating CSCO and ASND through product
leadership, but they don't seem to notice that this implies they are in fact now winning
central office switching contracts on a weekly basis!
Rumor has it that many other deals have been signed, but haven't been announced yet.
It just strikes me that Nortel has all the right technology, but are they "converging" it
fast enough?
Please correct me if I'm wrong on this...
Andrew |
