Hi Alan,
Some general knowledge regarding the networking processor market.
It is realized by everyone today that NP is a must for networking devices from the center to the edge. A couple of years ago, Intel had all the buzz about NP. Now, IBM, Motorola, Broadcom, PMCS, Vitesse, and even some second tier companies are doing NPs. Not as well known is Cisco's Toaster 2 NP. It's been used for about a year now, for both lower end and high end products. From a shipment standpoint, Toaster 2 is the most successful NP, even though it's the least visible one. Besides Cisco, almost everyone is standardizing on TMS. And besides Cisco, almost everyone has a general purpose CPU core in side the NP to manage all of the little processing units. (For more information, read Microprocessor Report Dec/2000 and Jan/2001. There is also a Intel I/O processor story in there.)
[My speculation] Having a management processor on-chip or not doesn't change the fact that Cisco is determined to promote its own platform, so I doubt that Cisco will work anything out with WRS, UNLESS, WRS is willing to do something like licensing its full source code to Cisco. In fact, this is one solution that both Cisco and WRS can be happy about. The other NP players may not like this, but they have neither the resources to modify, maintain and support TMS nor the marketshare to make this an attractive deal for WRS. Assuming that TMS never gets into Toaster and that Cisco continues to dominate, TMS will not have a big marketshare. But if NP-powered devices can eat into Cisco's dominance as Juniper has done, TMS will do extremely well. Subsequently, WRS will have a lot more negotiation power with Cisco.
Also, doesn't TMS going into last mile boxes such as DSL and Cable Modem? This is a wide open market with no clear leader, perhaps Broadcom is the only one. I think TMS can do very well in this market, as well as home gateways that maybe combined into DSL boxes one day.
Regards,
Khan |
