djane, seems somewhat ridiculous about ERICY. Both the offer price, and that ASND
turned it down.
gbh, such an offer for ASND by ERICY, if it existed, would be as much defensive as it would be an offensive initiative for them to enter data networking. ERICY may be trying to pre-empt a LU takeover of ASND. They do in fact see LU as the archrival. Mory may have turned it down due to indications that LU will do better.
I have reason to believe LU is internally staffed for a major ATM development
effort. I will try confirm this next week.
You're absolutely right--LU has an internal ATM development effort. But that does not mean they will not buy ASND. As Bind pointed out earlier, Cisco has two separate ATM development teams as well--Stratacom as well as the old Lightstream group. Although they have somewhat different focuses, they are also competing against each other in many application areas. With a company the size of LU, this would not be unusual at all.
The problem with LU's current data development efforts is that they are at least two years behind Cisco and Ascend as far as developing capabilities for their ATM to support IP data. In Internet time, two years is an entire product lifecycle, perhaps even two. There's no guarantee that they can or will catch up to Cisco, and in fact I'm willing to bet that they will fall even further behind. IP is a complex protocol, and when you mix in QoS and voice traffic to it, the complexities are exponentially higher. Not even Cisco has a good grasp of this area yet, as their QoS features are very buggy and non-scalable--how can you expect LU to even be credible with their first-generation data products?
If I were a LU shareholder, I would be extremely concerned if they did not buy ASND.
bucky89 |
