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Technology Stocks : MRV Communications (MRVC) opinions? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sector Investor who wrote (17269)	12/4/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: Sector Investor	Respond to of 42804

A few bits about Zuma They have been working for over 1 year on this product. The box is working in the lab. It is designed as an "Enterprise, Metropolitan type product". Note the word Metropolitan. What's in a word? Look at this NAC link - lots of routers needed: new-access.com Their presentation was titled "Engine for the 21st century". Another slide was titled: "Raising reliability to an Art form". They have their architecture defined and a game plan for implementing it. Rather than try to do too much initially with ASICs and Software, and avoiding major hangups or delays getting the full-blown design working (which was stated is the reason other companies are having silicon problems) the first iteration of Zuma uses just one ASIC and "off the shelf" software. This is very smart, as they get the box out the door sooner and producing revenue, while they continue to work on subsequent iterations of the architecture with more bells and whistles. They expect to have boxes in customer's hands during 2Q 2000. They got the first spin of their ASIC back in June. It works, with 1 minor problem, that will not delay their rollout. Zuma will have "at least" a 4 fold performance increase over Extreme's high end product, with the "highest port density in the industry today". Their design includes: 4 matrix cards, each 64Gbps 16 access cards with four "IOM"s each. Each IOM has options for a 2 port GBE (gigabit Ethernet), or 16 port 10/100 dual IOM, or a CPU module with load sharing capability. They can also handle 10GbE when it comes out - either 16 if oversubscribed or 8 if not. "Oversubscribed" means you don't expect all ports to be running full bore simultaneously, so the higher port density doesn't overtax the box. Other terms used in the presentation: "Supercomputing Switch/Router", "tremendous flexibility", "Powerful and sophisticated QoS (quality of service) and traffic management, targeted at "Very large" Enterprise or Internet customers with NSP/New Telcos a long term goal. Zuma will enable "Revenue generating networks", meaning a customer using Zuma can have multiple customers running on the network, with complete security and reliability for each. All in all, this box looks HOT!

To: Sector Investor who wrote (17269)	12/4/1999 11:50:00 PM
From: Sector Investor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42804

Miscellaneous bits and pieces: The Mega site is HyperChannel. Westhills is basically "an experiment". MRVC management is having meetings with potential customers, VCs, analysts, etc. at the rate of 2 per week. Still searching for the OA CEO - don't expect to finish before the end of the year (but that's less than 4 weeks away and you can't count the holidays as productive). They are working on additional customers for the Triplexer (I think TCI was mentioned). General Instruments was still a major customer for OA's return path Lasers. China update. Everything is still OK there. They are experiencing "slow, steady growth", with revenues currently about $800,000 to $1 million per quarter. MRVC has two offices - in Beijing and Singapore. They are currently selling Fiber Driver in China. They see no reason that the startups' products will not sell also, when they are available. Regarding IPOs they "want to make it happen", but it is still "premature", and will be done when "ready". "We want to get the maximum value we can from each." (a nice thought). They are getting "advice" from the CEO and founder of Sun Micro. (That part was just slipped in). An IPO within 2 months is "probably not doable" - but that is only December and January, part of which the IPO market is shut down anyway. Re: Red-C. They expect revenue in Q1 2000, but it will be "not meaningful" (This matches up nicely with the post from Yahoo! that Red-C had a contract). They would not name any companies looking at the box, but they included large carriers and current RBAK customers, and the feedback was "highly enthusiastic" from all. I talked to Edmund about their going after the Enterprise T1/T3 E1/E3 business that Telcos currently sell to Enterprises in massive quantities. The Red-C box has this capability, but RBAK does not. This market needs high Qos, reliability and management services, which Red-C also has. Edmund said they were aware of the opportunity and were working to help data CLECs go after that market. This is potentially a HUGE additional market for Red-C. Re: Charlotte's Web. The product is extremely well designed. The team spent 6 months with White Boards before they actually started development. CW's ASICs are all working. There are only 4-5 companies in this high end market - Noam named Pluris, Avici, Nexabit, Juniper and CSCO, saying the last two may not really be players there. Noam said Avici can do 32 OC-48 ports in a 7' rack, while CW can pack in 128 OC-48 ports. CW is in Alpha, and is working in the lab. It will be in Beta the next 3 months with shipments in "mid-2000". They are working with "1st tier" Venture Capitalists. Their goal is to reduce CW to a minority position. Tomorrow, I'll post on the Foundry and on Fiber Driver.

To: Sector Investor who wrote (17269)	12/5/1999 6:56:00 AM
From: whitephosphorus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

Sector- You do GREAT work Have you ever talked with Noam on the subject of analyst coverage? I continue puzzled that no main line firm has picked up this Company (Bear doesn't count). Just curious. I keep asking around when I meet analysts and they seem mostly unaware. Guess that means coverage will only increase to the good of us shareholders/