Sanjay,
As a matter of fact I do work at xcom. I have been on board for the past seven or so years. I have watched the company transition from a Intel PC chipset based product to a full fledged RISC based backbone product. There are two pieces of the ATM product line being finished for Q4 shipping that will make the xcom products the industries biggest ATM edge device on the market.
These products are in the final BETA phases now and will provide full ATM connectivity between all xcom chassis for both token ring and ethernet users. If you know our heritage, xcom has grown up in the SNA world and added in routing capabilities as the market grew.
Take a look around at the existing ATM market and you will find very little work being done with the token ring environment. Fore Systems doesn't sell into it(no SNA experience and lack of token ring products), cisco can't emulate a token ring LAN, Xylan can't integrate and doesn't have any WAN connectivity. IBM and 25MB ATM is a joke, where are the customers????. Remember the 6611????
So let's review, ATM is high speed networking, not much competition in the token ring market that can provide the type of SNA services that the mainframe folks know and love. The mainframe is not going away and IBM keeps finding new ways to keep the mainframe alive. Look at companies like EMC (mainframe storage) or Computer Associates (mainframe applications) they are growing because they chose their markets wisely and focused and made intelligent decisions.
A previous thread mentioned revenue channels. The revenue channel expansion was initiated last year with resellers. An avenue that we all know is saturated with the "big three" products. Yet, we have picked our partners and are growing it. I think Wall Street expected instant results, yet you are selling at greater discounts and now forced to work with less margins.
The recent press announcements regarding the ATM division of xcom will provide another revenue stream. As you can imagine people lose focus very easily when the eyes of Wall Street are over your shoulder constantly. I personally believe that recent changes in management are for the better. Why? Sales is in control(Nigel Machin) of the company again, not engineers. Sales knows what is important to the customer not the developer(sorry guys) for their wants and needs.
When the stock hit $5, I bought and bought alot.
Chris |
