One of the first to see it all coming. An old interview but dead on accurate. Ravi Suria:
thestreet.com
And more recently from Roxanne Googin, who also saw it coming and still negative:
How Networking Advances Screwed Up the Economy
by Roxane Googin
isen.com
From Smartletter 57, also from dan isenberg:
According to Steve
Garofalo, the visionary founder of MetroMedia Fiber Network
(since Enronized), building the new local network will
require about 25 times the time and 25 times the expense of
the long-haul network build-out. All the accounting tricks
in the world will not reduce the time or effort required.
isen.com
From this months BCR magazine(subscription)but worth every penny:
Most edge device vendors agree that enterprise customers will eventually tire of managing what Packeteer's marketing vice president, Todd Krautkremer calls the "conga line" of devices that are crowding onto the enterprise edge. "You just can't continue to add them," he said. "There's a cost of ownership impact in managing and supporting those devices. Just having a field service policy on them is a huge expense for every location, every month."
How Many Boxes Does It Take to Access the WAN?
bcr.com
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Miscellaneous:
Ever wonder how all those market research firms can project out growth and spending 5+ years..Hehe:
How to Analysize the Analysts:
Psst. See that great stack of paper on the corner of your desk? You know the one. It contains all the latest research from your IT analyst firm—the research that costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Get up right now, pick up the pile and toss it in the garbage.
Dump it because most of the written material—especially the market projections—is not worth your time.
Why? Because more often than not, it is simply wrong. Remember GartnerGroup's late '80s prediction that OS/2—Microsoft and IBM's jointly developed operating system—would dominate the desktop within five years? Such predictions go wildly awry because typically they are based on little hard data and they try to cover a vast sweep of time. "Anyone who predicts a market will be a certain size five years out, put a muzzle on them. It's utterly irresponsible," says Evan Quinn, chief research officer for the Hurwitz Group, an IT analyst firm in Framingham, Mass.
"We used to joke that every market would be $1 billion by the year 2000," says Scott McCready, who logged nearly 12 years as an analyst at Yankee Group, IDC and Giga before becoming CEO of CIOview, a Boxborough, Mass., software vendor. "Once you come up with some kind of growth rate, all you have to do is compound that over several years and you're going to come up with a pretty big number. But [analysts] don't do a good job getting the constraints of the market right. I honestly think [most forecasters] sit around a campfire."
cio.com
Sooo...in December 2000 RHK said this about DWDM gear:
Research published last week by RHK says the market for dense wave division multiplexing components is set to explode, growing from $5 billion in 2000 to $24 billion by 2004. This year alone, the market for amplifiers and other widgets used to create terrestrial DWDM gear - which enables multiple wavelengths of light to run over a single fiber-optic connection on land, as opposed to undersea - will grow 130%. The consulting firm says no product area within the market will grow less than 80%.
The news bodes well for leading makers of DWDM components, such as Corning, JDS Uniphase, Fujitsu, the microelectronics division of Lucent, NEC, Nortel Networks and SDL. It also indicates good prospects for newcomers in the space, such as Avanex Corp. and Oplink Communications. All of these vendors, RHK says, were among the 40 or so companies who contributed information for use in the forecast.[Ha! Who drank the corporate kool-aid]
nwfusion.com
So, in the fall of 2000, Ravi Suria, Susan Kalla, Roxanne Googin crunched the numbers and the researchers crunched cocktail ice cubes with the corporate suits. Which ones do you think were really paying attention?
Not Cisco.
What went wrong at Cisco:
What Cisco's systems didn't do was model what would happen if one critical assumption—growth—was removed from both their forecasts and their mind-sets. If Cisco had run even modestly declining demand models, Chambers and Carter might have seen the consequences of betting on more inventory. But Cisco had enjoyed more than 40 straight quarters of stout growth. In its immediate past were three quarters of extreme growth as high as 66 percent. The numbers the virtual close presented to the eye of the beholders—the Cisco executives—painted a picture of the present as lovely and pleasant as a Monet landscape. According to many observers, Cisco's fundamental blunder was to rely on that pretty picture to assume the future would be equally pretty...
But some Cisco suppliers were not so sanguine.
"People see a shortage and intuitively they forecast higher," says Ajay Shah, CEO of Silicon Valley-based Solectron Technology Solutions Business Unit, a company that manufactures parts for the networking industry and for Cisco. "Salespeople don't want to be caught without supply, so they make sure they have supply by forecasting more sales than they expect," Shah explains. "Procurement needs 100 of a part, but they know if they ask for 100, they'll get 80. So they ask for 120 to get 100."
CHELLAM AT XILINX attributes Cisco's failure to act expeditiously to the fact that its software ignored such macroeconomic factors as debt levels, economic spending, interest rates, the bond market and so forth, while trusting data freighted with growth biases. In short, the virtual close and forecasting didn't include the right economic indicators...
They all ate the salmon, but today it's still a question of who or what is being smoked. The communications core infrastrure aint on the cycle time of the edge andd the edge is a jungle, a conga line of devices, myriad standards in flux and complexity. Think I'll go fishing! |
