Jack,
Interesting response. Here's a different view. First your statement:
Orginal Comment
Carriers will become the preferred sales channels, and the influence of today's one-stop shopping mergers and acquisitions will wane.
Your response:
I am not sure what he considers a carriers. I do not think he means the RBOCs, or AT&T. If anything, my observation is that the performance level of personnel (from those companies) related to "advanced network services" is exactly why many private companies invest in their own Network Administrative staffs. As we put into place more and more private ATM networks, we (my company and other Network Integrators) establish a reputation, in a lot of our accounts, of technical expertise that can not be found in the carriers or other "systems integrators." The downside, for me and other Network Integrators, is that it takes an incredible amount of training to keep up with the different manufacturers - and proper configuration of their equipment. It is very much like attending graduate school in electrical engineering, and never getting to graduate. Because of this high level of expertise and continuous training, I do not see the carriers of being able to provide enough network engineers to engineer all of the corporate and government networks that are out there. Highly trained personnel don't grow on trees, unfortunately.
You're right, great people don't grow on tree's, but carriers need to change their business model to succeed. With deregulation delivering bandwidth is quickly becoming a commodity business. Therefore carriers will seek new ways to improve margins and one of the areas being targeted is value added services. TO what extent this reality will encroach on traditional Network Integrators business remains to be seen, however this event will (and is) occurring.
Win98 has an ATM stack
Really? In what capacity and for what purpose? ATM LAN's are dead, so how would this addition help ATM buildout. ATM to the home over Cable or DSL could happen however the IP folks are in the lead and are a stronger force in this space...so chance ATM (via high bandwidth technology) makes it to the home is slim. So, an ATM stack in WIN98 I don't think will help the ATM battle much. I suspect MSFT is doing this as a hedge and it's probably a fall out of work being done on NT. JMO
Gary (not Korn) |
