Thanks J.Fieb for the article. As far as Sun/Enron competing with HLIT/Divicom, here are my comments.
Optical Networking lowers the cost of bandwidth. Lower cost of bandwidth results in huge new industries becoming viable, such as worldwide distribution of digital content, such as movies, over the internet, and worldwide intelligent control of business operations, production, shipments, financials, ecommerce, etc..etc.......thru emerging ASPs. Companies that adapt and thrive in this new world ASP environment, will become huge by todays standards. We will see trillion dollar companies, instead of billion dollar companies by the end this decade as a result of this.
Mega system (huge), Data Center ASPs that evolve, from empowering the new world intellgent companies, will be powered by Fibre Channel/Infiniband Storage Networks, that connect around the world via huge optical backbones. These core optical backbones and SANs will pipe out the bandwidth over optical tributaries (DWDM) that push the bandwidth close to the edge of the net.
The equipment that is required to build these tributaries will be supplied by HLIT/Divicom, Osicom, etc.... The equipment required to build the optical backbones that will be supplied to companies like Enron, Global Crossing, MCI Worldcom, will be supplied by companies like Cisco, Sycamore, etc...The Storage Area Networks will be supplied to AOL Time Warner, GBLX Global Center, Qwest Data Center, etc......huge etc......will be supplied by Sun, EmC, MTI, etc.....
The worldwide DWDM/FC SAN/Infiniband SAN will become the platform for the New World corporate giants to emerge on. I think there will be tremendous competition and improvement in services, and no need to worry about a monopolistic type model emerging.
HLIT/Divicom's strength is in developing better architectures for building the tributaries thru compressing data via MPEG and cost efficiently designing and building reliable DWDM fiber optic systems to carry this compressed data. By doing this they sell a product that allows the owners of the networks, to channel video, data, and voice streams, to and from the consumer at much lower costs, enabling large money making roll outs of broadband access to more users. The more users that are connected, the more relevant the whole network becomes to the mainstream world, and the more opportunities for ecommerce, and new ideas to make money, emerge. All of this then leads to the need for much larger backbones, storage area networks, and ASPs.
This new platform that is emerging for an all encompassing networked life, where Intelligent Companies, that fully integrate every advantage of the internet into running their business and meeting peoples needs, embracing customers in the e-market place, recruiting and employing human capital over extranets, etc....,keeping people entertained and keeping people informed with digital video; will grow to be very large and will require huge amounts of equipment to build it. Therefore the companies supplying the best infrastructure for scaling on highly efficient open network architectures, will see huge growth in the coming years, and the ones that drag their feet or supply architectures that limit customers, will wither and die off or evolve in niche markets.
Regards,
Joe |
