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Strategies & Market Trends : The Thread Formerly Known as No Rest For The Wicked -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stuart T who wrote (57064)	9/3/1999 1:05:00 PM
From: Stuart T	Respond to of 90042

Cabletron goes down new paths September 3, 1999 PC Week via NewsEdge Corporation : Networking giant pins hopes on branching out into software, services efforts By Paula Musich And John S. Mccright Working to shore up its tenuous financial position, Cabletron Systems Inc. is broadening its network offerings with new software and services. As he closes the books on the company's second fiscal quarter this week, new Chairman and CEO Piyush Patel is looking to move Cabletron beyond offering hardware and management for corporate networks. Patel's plan: Remake the company into a supplier of products and services for carriers, ISPs (Internet service providers) and enterprise sites. To get there, Cabletron plans to acquire new software for its Spectrum network management framework, release new networking hardware for ISPs and offer a series of new services. "We are looking to acquire billing and accounting applications and monitoring applications for Spectrum," Patel said in an interview last week at the company's headquarters here. "In the future, we will also add policy management and directory enablement." On the hardware side, Cabletron plans to roll out at next month's NetWorld+Interop show in Atlanta a high-performance edge router for ISPs. The Edge Aggregation router will incorporate Layer 3 and Layer 4 switching capabilities into a device that handles not only Gigabit Ethernet traffic but also asynchronous transfer mode, packet-over-Synchronous Optical Network, T-1 and T-3 traffic. This will give administrators the ability, for example, to prioritize packets across wide-area links, Patel said. The router will be able to forward more than 70 million packets per second. Cabletron also will show at N+I a product capable of carrying voice traffic over a digital subscriber line link from the home into a central office. In addition, Cabletron is getting ready to announce a service, called Smart Sourcing, in which it will run the internal networks of large organizations for a monthly per-user fee. The idea is to help clients avoid the technical and financial risks of owning their in-building infrastructures. As proof of the Smart Sourcing concept, Cabletron bought the in-house networking infrastructure of AT&T Corp. and has been running the 150,000-user network for about a year. Cabletron is at a turning point after posting a net loss of $22.5 million in the quarter ended May 31, followed this summer by the retirement of founder and CEO Craig Benson. Patel, handpicked by Benson to lead Cabletron out of its morass, inherited a company with a reputation for good products and support but also a host of serious problems, including the perception that it has lost touch with the market. Its financial performance over the last several quarters has been checkered at best, and the company's recent history has spooked some big customers who are not waiting for a turnaround. "We got rid of their stuff over the past year because we had concerns about the long-term viability of the company," said BobCurrier, director of data communications at Duke University, in Durham, N.C. "There was, and still is, a lot of concern about what their direction is, whether they'll be bought, whether Cabletron will be here three years from now." Although the reliability of Cable tron equipment is not an issue, some users say they can no longer justify the high cost of the company's wares. 'http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&board=4687123 &tid=cs&sid=4687123&mid=28518