I had asked our friends at Investor Relations about the competitive threat of LU enter our space. Here is a majority of the e-mail that I received in reply:
Regarding the LU announcement of their Layer 3/Layer 4 IP Switch, I would say it is still too premature to gauge the impact of that product. The product is not expected to go into beta until the end of the year, with availability in 1999. Since it is a high speed IP switch, it will compete against other IP switches, primarily Cisco, Ascend, Bay and other smaller Layer 3 IP switch vendors. In this space, there are a couple of disadvantages that Lucent faces.....
1) Competing against incumbents -- Lucent may have good relationships with carriers on the telephony side (class 5 switches), but we currently do not see Lucent in competitive bids on the data networking side. This will change as Lucent becomes more competitive with their data products, however, Lucent is late in the game. Many of the large networking decisions are being made this year and once a vendor gets installed, it is very difficult to uproot an incumbent in a carrier network.
2) Lucent's data products are not yet "market proven" in the carrier
space. This means that it will take sometime for the carriers to
extensively test and gain a comfort level with the products before they consider deploying such a product. This also adds time....again, Lucent is late breaking into the carrier/data market.
3) Lucent's announcement claims over 120 gigabit backplane. We won't know until the product is put through its paces whether or not the switch can really scale to those high speeds. Its possible to put x-number of interfaces in a switch, count them up and decide the switch reaches x-speed. However, we'll have to wait and see if the performance of the switch holds when going fully loaded at full line speed.
These are just thoughts off the top of my head. Generally speaking, Ascend is not standing still with regard to the competition. We are working on next generation platforms in Access, ATM and IP areas, as well as on the voice integration front. These are all areas where we will have new products available late 1998/1999.
Sounds like our team is not running in fear, but is running an R&D shop that might do that to others.
IMHO, (-8 Dennis 8-) |
