"Thank YOU for talking to me. I'm the "foreigner" from the ASND thread.
First I want to say that I am neither long nor short NT and long ASND."
Cool! I was worried that I was being too aggressive, and ignorant at the same time! Oh yeah, and I was talking about the impressive sounding GX 550 announcement.(The CBX 500 struck me as unimpressive in the past). Definately means I have more work to do.
Regarding NT buying ASND, for the reasons I gave to Glenn, I just don't see it happening. (now just watch them announce it tomorrow at earnings<g>) In ATM and frame relay, NT is already at least very strong. So Cascade doesn't offer much, unless Nortel wants to buy their OC-12, OC-48 port technology (and whatever else applies here) for a pretty steep price.<g> Maybe they've got that in the labs already anyway. I have no idea. Now for the ASND side of things, I read today that 70% of their revenues have until recently come from the MAX line of remote access concentrators. (that sounds kinda scary). But of course the GRF sounds like a big deal - so Nortel would get MAX and switched routers (which I don't believe they make in house now) - both high growth, and both making Nortel more of an end-to-end shop. Actually, the more I think about it, it does sound intriguing. Wouldn't THAT get Cisco's attention!
And then there's the culture shock question - Nortel is definately not like ASND's seat of the pants operation. It's built it's reputation on quality first. ASND creates explosive markets. Nortel kind of makes them respectable. I doubt ASND's Silicon Valley options-drenched gunslingers would be too happy in that environment. And would Nortel want that rowdy, seat-of-the-pants vibe? I doubt it. They're still very Canadian in a lot of ways. Maybe I'm way off base though. We'll see.
"ASND appears to have waked up to this problem. After spending all Summer
chasing these problems, and watching their stock careen all over the
place. In their recent Q3 Conference Call, they indicated they were
moving to increase R&D spending from 10-12% to 13-14%, which should
go a long way to solving these types of problems first and help
correct this image later."
Probably just growing pains...
"I don't know a lot about this area either. What we need is for a
heavy technical type to join in with some information on this."
I've been begging for someone like that to jump in both here and on the Newbridge thread for months...
"No, thats fine, I want to learn too."
I don't hang out on the CSCO, ASND, or COMS threads cause they're too crazy. Around here you can actually have a conversation. I think this "big" ATM stuff is really taking off, so I'm scrambling to try to understand it. My "networker" positions(in order) are COMS, CSCO, NN, NT and ANCR. I keep thinking about Ascend as it has gotten much cheaper. It's probably a no brainer, but I have some misgivings about recent events. I try to think long term, but could they implode? Maybe you could help me out there. The other consideration is avoiding having *all* of my money in networking!<g>
"A few months back there was a rumor about ASND and ANET (a VoFR and VoIP company), but
that quickly died down. I think all three forms of voice will be
important. In what priority order would you place them, in the RAS
space, the WAN space and the LAN space?"
Is FR really a growth technology? Everyone seems to be phasing out of it gradually, and into ATM. I know even less about it than ATM though.<g> I guess I'm really big on voice over ATM in the carrier central office - it almost seems inevitable that carriers will merge their data and voice infrastructures - and ATM seems to be the technology of choice. NN's recent contracts seemed to resonate rather loudly. As for VoIP, I'm sure it fits in there with internet telephony and all that - but wouldn't that all get crammed into ATM pipes at the backbone anyway? I have to learn more about this layer 3 switching vs. routing argument!
Maybe it would a lot easier just to buy some of all the networkers and read a book instead!<g>
"you DO have a
Power Network, don't you? <G>"
Yeah, but it's just a single node right now...<g>
Regards,
Andrew |
