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Technology Stocks : Ciena (CIEN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Fulop who wrote (9224)	6/16/2000 8:54:00 AM
From: jghutchison	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12623

Market Share (ot) Optical Networking market share figures can be very misleading to even the most sophisticated investors, journalists, and industry players. The reasons for this is simply that the optical networking market is composed of two distinctly different technologies: legacy SONET/SDH equipment, and disruptive state-of-the-art technology including long and short haul DWDM, optical switching, and optical routing. Frequently, all these technologies are lumped together and called optical networking. The analogy is akin to comparing a Yugo and a Ferrari and calling them automobile transportation. One is a clunker, the other is sleek, elegant, and very fast. It would be helpful to see market share figures broken out by sector and company. I addressed this issue to the senior editor of Lightreading, and he agreed that the topic was worth exploring. Yesterday's article, DWDM: Bigger Than SONET? may well be a partial response to that request. It is a good start. However, the second article, Nortel Extends Optical Lead, again failed to break out the sectors and lumped the Yugos with the Ferraris, and therefore misleads the reader. Furthermore, market share figures and projections prepared by the consulting firms, Dell'Oro, RHK, and Pioneer often conflict, and confuse. Within the latter article, two items stand out: "Cisco shipped only $20 million of optical transport products in the first quarter, and Ciena on the other hand showed strong growth." I've seen several references to the Cisco/Cerent switch having an annual revenue run rate of $1 billion. That's a bit better than $20 million per quarter. To state that Ciena's growth rate is strong fails to point out the fact that Ciena is major player here in North America, and the dominate player elsewhere in DWDM and optical switching technology. I realize that deadlines are important, but I would like to see a complete and comprehensive presentation broken out by sector, company, market research firm, and year over year growth. I would be nice to see this presented in tabular and graphical format. Then we can draw conclusions as to market share by company, growth prospects, etc. If Lightreading is not up to the task, would anyone here care to take it on? Jack Hutchison

To: James Fulop who wrote (9224)	6/25/2000 7:21:00 AM
From: James Fulop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12623

>>An active debate in the communications field revolves around whether systems vendors should custom-design their own Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) or purchase the raw chips: FPGAs, or programmable logic. With an FPGA, you can take the chips in-house and use software to configure the logic circuits for your own purposes. One example of a company using such an approach is Sycamore Networks Inc. sycamorenet.com (Nasdaq: SCMR). In a recent visit to Sycamore Networks, I noticed that a bevy of their high-speed networking cards held Xilinx chips. On the other end of the debate, there is a company such as Redback Networks redback.com (Nasdaq:RBAK), which is focusing on using the expertise from its Siara acquisition to build custom ASICs.<< Full article at: lightreading.com Ciena's ASIC involvement has been mentioned on this thread before, but I was wondering about Ciena's FPGA involvement. Anybody know? (Or is Ciena totally in the ASIC camp?) Thanks