Frank,
Just a couple of comments. I agree that NT has the best balance of carrier and enterprise expertise to serve the emerging integrated voice/data market, but I am not convinced that there will be as much technical or market synergy as many project. The real threat to Lucent of its tiny position in enterprise data is to its PBX and key system sales, not to its carrier business. I suspect we will see further acquisitions to shore up this part of their business.
Cisco has a long row to hoe in really breaking into voice, but is closer on the enterprise side than on the carrier side. Why does Cisco want to go after the voice market? Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. Regardless of "voice will be free rhetoric", more than 85% of telco revenues come from voice services. Voice over IP will capture an interesting, yet small proportion of voice revenue, but most of it will be circuit switched or ATM switched for a long, long time. DWDM gives carriers the flexibility to treat different applications and different customers differently, with multiple parallel architectures - service differentiation will be the rallying cry for carriers in the next millenium, not "one size fits all" commodity.
As for the Cisco DLC, I just had to laugh, because while Cisco likes to talk about "new world, old world" and "voice will be free", it knows it needs to play in an architectural framework defined by others. DLC is a point where data traffic can be separated from voice and shunted to the internet. Cisco would like to own that point as a step to playing a much broader role in defining telco architectures. If they can do it, it would be a great stepping stone to becoming more of an "old world" supplier, in the process delivering alot of value to shareholders.
BTW I use integrated rather than converged because I believe the case for a unitary network architecture has been grossly overstated. Carrier networks have been growing more and more complicated over the past twenty years, a trend that is accelerating. Gateways, service management systems, customer management software, etc. will be very, very important. All IMHO. |
