Jeff,
I do not have technical knowledge of the 3Com products. A friend of mine had some of their ASND Pipeline class ISDN routers, and they (the 3Com products) did not work as advertised. I do know a lot of 3Com accounts around the Southeast. We do not usually get into the bidding wars with the other network integrators calling on them, because we are not at 3Com's highest level of Certification. We might propose BAY, CSCO, ASND or Nbase, depending on the application. There are at least six 3Com Premier Integrators in Atlanta alone. They must constantly bid against each other, and we have seen the margins below 10%.
It would not be desirable to run a network systems integration business on those margins. I spend over $150,000 a year on training for 6 technical people to stay current on about 6 product lines alone. That doesn't include the continuing education needed of all of the sales people and other support people. It is kind of like being a college student forever, except you have to produce working corporate networks while continuing education. FWIW, I spent $10,000 and lost the use of 2 systems engineers, while they attended training on CHKPF within the last month.
Jack
PS: I am not so sure of the networking stocks have had a flu shot. I am going to try to pull together some numbers for the week of 10/17/97. Let's see how they did last time around. Does anyone have an easy way of doing this? I have to pull up one company's chart at a time, in the annual view, and estimate the numbers. |
