Jeff, I'm not counting CPQ or INTC out of this bidding war yet!
Just because LU and NT are considered best fit, doesn't mean
that other more enterprise oriented companies might not want
to make the leap to end-to-end. Right now, nobody has the
product mix that Cisco has and the high margins that Cisco has.
Therefore low margine companies like CPQ may eagerly salivate
at the prospect of Cisco-like margins. Whereas LU and NT know
that Cisco will corner voice/data integrated networks if
they don't make a move. Voice switches are like dinosaur
mainframes, and voice calls do not make the best usage of
bandwidth, being connection oriented. IP telephony /
multimedia, streaming whatever, is going to be big. And
whomever can provide the guns and butter to the like of
Worldcom, AT&T, RBOCs, ILEC, ISPs will profit greatly.
That is why all eyes are on Ascend with it's portfolio of
ip-switches, ras, frame-relay, atm, dial concentrators,
dslam, videoconferencing, firewalls, etc. The great growth
area is not in LANs, not in NICs, not in the edge, but
frankly in the Internet and the Virtual Private Networks
that link groups of people together from across the Internet.
Hence your "LAN" will be the Internet.
Ascend, IMHO is the prize. Of course Cisco is too, but
Nortel and Lucent can't swallow an elephant! |
