Do any of these investors read the rags? Answer: NO. Most people are following the crowd and many except for the founder who paid $65,000 for his shares which thanks to people on this thread are worth over 1.1 billion.
Check it out:
computerworld.com
Highlights:
This is one of AKAM's competitors. Check out the market for these guys!! Overall, it's not large.
F5 isn't the only company that wants to fulfill those expectations. The company is facing a large competitive threat from networking behemoth Cisco Systems Inc., says Peter Christy, an analyst at Internet Research Group Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.
Cisco and other router and switch vendors are putting load-balancing capabilities in to their network hardware, undercutting F5 in the basic load-balancing market.
"The basic function of traffic management will continue to migrate into lower and lower-priced products," says Christy. "In a couple of years, the $20 Ethernet hub will have basic load balancing in there in the chips."
"They're fast-moving. They listen to customers," Hoover says. "When the smoke settles and there are only three or four vendors left in this space, one of them will be F5 for sure."
Red flags for IT:
Some switches and software now sport load-balancing capabilities; who will buy a separate box to duplicate the task?
Analysts predict the market will be limited -- about $1 billion in 2001. With 20 companies, someone's bound to lose.
Cisco might decide to muscle in to the market.
Akamai means "Cool". It's going to be cool for the founder and not so cool for a bunch of investors some day. |
