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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications-News Only!!! (ASND)

ASND 209.02

-0.7%

Nov 24 3:59 PM EST

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To: Gary Korn who wrote (388)	10/23/1997 7:44:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) of 1629

It's the World vs. Cisco By Kevin Tolly, 10/20/97 Such was IBM's dominance of computing a decade and more ago that multi-million dollar businesses were built on the premise of luring away some small segment of IBM's customer base. Rather than oppose IBM by offering competing architectures, these vendors leveraged de facto IBM standard environments to their own advantage. Amdahl did it with mainframes and front-end processors, Memorex-Telex with communications controllers and Computer Associates with utility software - just to name a few. Such is Cisco's dominance of internetworking that it has now become a similar target. This year has seen an unprecedented number of "attacks" on Cisco's customer base by vendors looking to recreate the successes an earlier generation of vendors had against IBM. In 1997, The Tolly Group was commissioned to conduct at least a dozen competitive evaluations involving Cisco products. In 1996, there were none. The strategies used by the aggressive third-party vendors vary little from those employed in the past against IBM. Typically, vendors implement one of three methods: outperform the target product, offer the same performance but lower price or bypass - devise alternative methods of accomplishing the same goal as the target product. (For further details, see Exhibit: It's the World vs. Cisco) 3Com and Digital over the past few months actively have been battling Cisco's Catalyst 5000 LAN switch. 3Com started things in May with a Fast Ethernet and FDDI benchmark pitting its CoreBuilder 5000 against Cisco. Go online at The Tolly Group home page and call up Doc. #7277 (see below for URL). Earlier this month, Digital put its MultiSwitch 900/VNswitch 900XX Fast Ethernet switch up against the Cisco and 3Com switches (Doc. #7302). IBM threw down the gauntlet in a massive test of mainframe channel-to-LAN connectivity (Doc. #s 7291 and 7292). Strange as it is to contemplate, IBM is the challenger in the fight to prove its dominant in token ring-to-channel connectivity - both technologies IBM invented. Also gaining much attention is the hand-to-hand combat going on between Ascend and Cisco in the ISP router space. The battle has seen the "leadership" position change hands several times over just a few months as each vendor deploys more powerful distributed routing solutions (Doc. #s 7286, 7295 and 7306). Decidedly less dramatic but significant nonetheless is the "clone" option. We've seen only one of these in the lab so far, but what we've seen is impressive. South Korean vendor Ssang Yong offers a pair of products - the SR-2501 Router and the SR-2505 RUB (router/ hub) - that match the Cisco equivalents in every way but price. (Doc. #7276). It is a sign of maturity in the industry that the 3rd party "plug compatible" market is now burgeoning. While it may initially appear to make matters more complicated, in the long run it will certainly drive down prices and increase network manager's choices. Who could ask for anything more?

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