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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (21259)	3/24/2000 3:16:00 PM
From: mtnlady	Respond to of 54805

NT vs. Cisco's (still to be seen) OC-192 product: UF a lot of companies have products in the lab (i.e. as of November Cisco has "active OC192 programs in process" ). But "in the lab" and "in the market" are too totally different scenarios. Can you imagine what NT has "in the lab". It sure isn't their OC-192 products because they've already been "out in the market" - not lab - for quite a long time now. September 1995 to be precise. OC-192 and it's "very tiny market": LU thought OC-192 would be a "very tiny market" share at this point in time too. Wrong.. From the LU analysis after NT "drove a truck" through their market share.. "The Q1'00 revenues shortfall at Lucent was directly related to its D-WDM decision. In their current state of rapid technological evolution, big long-haul continental or nationwide telecom systems have virtually standardized on 10-gigabit (OC-192) core equipment . Nortel's 10-gigabit equipment dominates the big system market winning at least 75% of all contracts." Cisco doesn't "or need to be the first entrant in order to guarantee large market share" . First "entrant" was clear back in 1995 by NT. UF how much longer will Cisco wait? Train has long sense left the station. As to OC192 being "merely a continuous innovation." I think you will find NT there all along the fiber optic learning curve. Cisco's expertise is in the enterprise network arena. Not the same 'curve' at all (note: 3Com, Newbridge, Bay, etc.. ALL belonged to the enterprise network 'curve' - totally unrelated to fiber optics). "But as a Gorilla gamer.." Exactly UF! That is why Nortel's running away with market share is so important. Moore states that market share lost during the tornado is never regained. "I'm sure you won't fall into the trap of looking at individual product offerings to assess Cisco's future prospects." My thoughts exactly. NT offers customers the whole end-to-end package (not individual components) and their huge number of wins in the fiber optic sector is proof of this. Cisco is simply, nowhere to be seen yet, except trying to put together "individual product offerings" through acquisitions. Once Cisco gets past this stage (i.e. "individual product offerings") then they can begin to compete against NT and LU which offer the total package. "Cisco's dominance is due to software, not hardware.. " A lesson not lost at all on NT. In fact they have a total software network solution (no box required) backed by over a hundred vendors including Intel, MS and many, many others. But then again .. we are talking apples to oranges here.. enterprise networking is NOT fiber optics. But my point is that NT is very strong in software. In fact that is how I got involved with them. They bought out a software company I owned stock in.

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (21259)	3/26/2000 7:38:00 PM
From: wopr1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Cisco's Software Control: While researching Extreme (EXTR) for the Hunt, I came across this article: zdnet.com The interesting part was on Switched Routing: Cisco's Tag Switching architecture is a good example of switched routing. To implement tag switching, Cisco routers are software-upgraded to become either tag-edge routers or tag switches depending on their location in the network. A tag-edge router is a true router that sits on the network edge and adds addressing information, in the form of fixed-length identifiers called tags, to packets entering the network. A tag switch is a router or switch that sits on the interior network and uses the tags to determine the appropriate path through the network for each packet. The use of tags reduces the complexity of packet decoding and table lookups when forwarding packets. Cisco has also created the Tag Distribution Protocol (TDP) to allow tag routers and switches to distribute tag information. Cisco has submitted tag switching to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardization. Looks like Cisco is creating a new proprietary protocol. Is this an example of the Gorilla is defending its router dominance through software? -wopr p.s. The article was a good primer of switches cracking into Layer 3 "routing".