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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tradeyourstocks who wrote (6874)	8/4/2000 5:13:28 PM
From: EJhonsa	Respond to of 34857

I think CSCO is already in. They are providing infrastructure in a partnership with Nokia. I know, but they're primarily providing standard IP networking equipment such as routers here, nothing new to them. Obviously Nokia, or anyone else in this field save for maybe Lucent or Nortel, can't put up products that are competitive with Cisco's here, so the deal made sense. However, I don't think that they're the best of friends with Nokia right now, as the two are already competing in the firewall, DSL concentrator, wireless LAN, and VPN server markets. Nokia's buyout of Network Alchemy was aimed directly at Cisco. What I was talking about was Cisco potentially making a full-fledged push into base stations, wireless switches, etc. They'd obviously be crazy to try to do all of this in-house, this late in the game. My guess is that they'll shell out for a slew of startups, and maybe buy out a second-rate division from a competitor that doesn't want it anymore, which is exactly what they did to get into optical networking market (Cerent, Monterey, Pirelli's DWDM division). Generally, Cisco doesn't make the best purchases possible, but they tend not to make poor ones either (the Pirelli buyout was an exception to this rule), and they always make up for the difference by means of one of the finest sales departments in the world. Cerent, which had almost no sales a year ago, is now set for over $1 billion in sales this year. Cisco already has significant customer relationships with a number of major carriers around the world, so that might soften the bureaucratic issues that tend to stem from a new vendor coming in. The only problems here are that the wireless equipment field generally hasn't been as entrepreneurial as the optical networking market, with a relatively smaller percentage of sales coming from young startups, and that Cisco, not possessing a handset division, something I don't think that they'd ever bother with (and with good reason), won't be able to offer a full-fledged solution. But neither can Lucent or Nortel, and they've done alright; and with the industry getting much more competitive with the rush to wireless data, this might not be as much of a weakness as it might've been a few years ago. Eric