<< They want a "CSCO company" hand-holding they're every move. I think COMS' strategy is to say, we don't need the F-500 sector that much. The SME sector is much bigger and they can sell much more volume. I think this is the "truly profitable" market is to be found.>>
<< Re: Service issues. You have a bit of a point there, but I can get hand holding from COMS with a simple phone call to tech support. The same as with CSCO. True COMS won't send someone to the site, but they will recommend someone good in the area, which is better IMHO.>>
Some corrections here: COMS competes on the high end daily, and has a nice (and growing) portfolio of large corporate customers. The share here should grow as new CoreBuilder and PathBuilder products are introduced. However, taking them from CSCO is difficult - the obvious prey is Bay and Cabletron customers, and any other networker. This is where the shakeout will occur, as the weak will die - CSCO will suffer the least here. Customers change when they can't get the technology from their installed vendor, or when they lose confidence in them. This is happening with Bay, CS, FORE, etc. customers than CSCO.
COMS has a direct support organization for these customers that handle all service and support issues, as well as project mgmt., installation, and the necessary handholding.
The name of the game in this space is to survive the shakeout and then ride the growth wave as large enterprises upgrade to 10/100 switching, Gigabit and OC-12 backbones and coverged WANs for voice and data.
Joe - EB's thoughts on the carrier space is that the carrier core will eventually be a big dumb voice/data pump, with the intelligence at the edge/entry points to this core. His strategy is to leverage Total Contol's installed base with the large carrier's (whereas ASND is strong with the regional ISP's) and provide this multiservice access and then an intelligent high speed handoff to the dumber core. If proved correctly, nice for COMS - if not, nice for the core players. |
