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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick McDougall who wrote (34773)	11/29/1999 5:01:00 PM
From: westpacific	Respond to of 108040

VRTA - making a move at the close, recent IPO. May have seen its low at $23. September 3, 1999 VIRATA CORP (VRTA) S-1 Filing (SEC form S1) Virata provides communications processors which are combined with a comprehensive suite of software for digital subscriber line equipment manufacturers. These tightly integrated products enable our customers to develop a diverse range of digital subscriber line, or DSL, equipment including modems, gateways and routers targeted at the broadband access market. We believe our systems expertise, products and support services enable DSL equipment manufacturers to simplify product development, speed time-to-market and focus resources on product differentiation. Significant growth in demand for broadband access is being driven by consumers and business users who find current dial-up Internet access too slow and faster frame relay or T1/E1 services too expensive. Digital subscriber line, technologies enable service providers to offer a range of affordable broadband access services using the existing copper wire telephone infrastructure. To meet the demands of the rapidly growing DSL market, original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, encounter a number of challenges. These include evolving technical standards, an expanding range of feature expectations and shorter product life cycles. In response to these challenges, OEMs are increasingly relying upon third party specialists to supply key technology components including semiconductors and software. However, integration of these individual elements can be a complex, costly and time-consuming task. The combination of our communications processors and software replaces numerous software elements and semiconductors which would otherwise have to be sourced from multiple vendors and then integrated and tested. Our standards compliant products are based on a flexible architecture that: . simplifies the addition of features; . can be used with a range of third party DSL physical layer transceivers; and . offers compelling price/performance. By adopting our solutions, our customers enjoy numerous benefits including: . faster time-to-market; . reduced product cost; . opportunity to focus their engineering resources on product differentiation; . ability to design multiple products using different subsets of our modular software; and . re-use of software extensions they develop on future generations of their products. Our objective is to be the leading supplier of communications processors and integrated software to broadband access OEMs. We intend to achieve this objective by: . initially focusing on DSL markets; . leveraging our flexible semiconductor and software architectures to introduce an expanding range of communications processors and software modules; . licensing our software to all our customers; and . pursuing strategic acquisitions. We outsource the manufacturing of our semiconductors, which allows us to focus our resources on the design, development and marketing of our products. To date we have licensed our software to 27 companies. These customers have developed, or are developing, 74 designs of which 28 are currently shipping. Leading DSL customers include Netopia, Orckit Communications and Westell Technologies. In July 1998, we completed the acquisition of RSA Communications, our first strategic acquisition. Our commercial, financial and operations headquarters are in Santa Clara, California. Research and development facilities and sales offices are located in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Cambridge, England.