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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates
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To: LindyBill who wrote (3137)6/25/1999 12:44:00 PM
From: Mr.Fun  Read Replies (2) of 54805
 
At the request of LindyBill:

1) I think the biggest mistake that alot of observers make in examining the telco equipment market is to assume there is some technical nirvana end-state toward which the whole industry is converging. The "network" is actually a network of networks, comprising many technologies and services. History suggests that new networking technologies do not eliminate older networking technologies, rather they are bolted on in parallel.

2. The real lasting aspect of IP as a technology is simply that it assigns a unique number to each and every device attached to the network. Routing technology is no more set in stone than ATM or circuit philosophies - actually, in 5-7 years I predict we will all be wondering whether all optical switches operating on an "IP" protocol that differs wildly from the electronics defined current version will replace gigabit and terabit routers.

3. Cisco's position with public carriers is nowhere near as strong as you suggest. Their domination of internet class routers is driven by the difficulty in writing an implementation of Border Gateway Protocol that is totally compatible with Cisco's fairly byzantine version. I do not believe that BGP is as much of a hurdle to deep-pocket carrier competitors as EIGRP and other proprietary protocols have been in the enterprise. Carriers want Cisco because of the marketing cache it can bring to bear against enterprise customers. Carriers fear Cisco because they hate relying on a single vendor for a product class and because it has not proven itself to be capable of delivering the reliability they expect.

4. I agree that CSCO, LU and NT will all get rich over time, but I disagree that CSCO will get richest. LU would be my choice by a wide margin. The real challenge for network architectures is to make it all work together - you said yourself we will have multiple networks for a long time. Lucent above all of these companies can deliver all of the parts. If I were peddling solutions, the last company I would want to represent would be Cisco - they have one piece, IP routing. Cisco is nowhere near able to resolve the software mess the telcos are in. It has nothing in optical. It has nothing in wireless. It has nothing in telephony. Lucent leads in all of those areas and now with the addition of ASND it can go head to head for the data. All IMHO
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