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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (50057)	3/15/2001 6:19:34 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

Unisphere aims to beat Cisco and Redback on road to IPO By Simon Marshall, Total Telecom 14 March 2001 Siemens-owned IP carrier edge vendor Unisphere Networks revealed Wednesday how it intends to compete head-to-head with both Cisco Systems and Redback Networks, having finally registered for a long-overdue IPO on the Nasdaq. Unisphere, which was formed in 1999 from Siemens' acquisition of convergence specialists Argon Network, Castle Networks and Redstone Communications, believes it's riding a growth curve that saw revenue for 2000 at US$49.6 million, but revenue for Q1 2001 at US$30.06 million, although no date for IPO has been announced. "We've filed for an IPO in the U.S., and we could have filed last May, but we believe in growing a business first," chief operating officer Thomas Burkardt told Total Telecom. Despite a financial headwind in terms of getting a market valuation now, and the fact it originally planned to list during Q1 this year, Unisphere has not resorted to traditional methods to boost product uptake. "I can tell you right now that we've not [vendor] financed a single deal, and we haven't sold any of our stock to customers either," said Burkardt. "We're cleared to go for an IPO, and we're monitoring the market." Whatever happens in the coming months, Siemens will want a return on the US$1.1 billion total investment made in Unisphere until it withdrew funding last August, and will retain an 87% stake when its offspring lists. Unisphere's valuation may be enhanced by a product portfolio which it claims offers carriers the ability to integrate both SONET and IP networks for transport, route packets and deal with subscriber management in one box, and offer their customers service self-provisioning over a Web interface. The latter is considered particularly important for retaining end users in Europe. "We've had to build a service architecture from the ground up because we can't name the services which will be popular in the next few months," said Burkardt. He plans to compete simultaneously with Redback Networks and Cisco Systems by combining both their main edge product's functionality in one box. "Our products are different because they keep traffic in its native form, which means it's a less expensive per-port product. Also, Cisco has had difficulty delivering quality of service because their routers are software-based, and ours use hardware-based ASICs," said Burkardt. In theory, this means operating costs associated with packetizing voice traffic could be reduced, but it's the facility for customers to provision their own services that may produce orders from European incumbents, which Burkardt says are waiting to be signed. Unisphere opened an office in Spain today, one in Paris last week, and plans to have eight in Europe in total by the end of this year including Italy and the U.K, along with a new U.K. test center. Corresponding offices in the Middle East and Africa are also on the slate for 2001. It also announced today a global OEM deal with Marconi to resell and distribute its Intelligent Service POP product set, although Siemens remains its main distributor. United Networks and Paris-based Softway will distribute in the U.K. and France respectively. Intelligent Service POP includes: The SMX-2100 voice switch and media gateway, the SRX-3000 Softswitch and the ERX-700 and 1400 routing hardware. The Unisphere Service Selection Center, which allows carriers to roll out customer self-provisioning Web portals. In conjunction with BroadWorks, the CommPilot unified messaging solution, which is currently running through a U.S. pilot. Unisphere is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts and its customers include PCCW, Korea Telecom, Global Crossing, China Telecom and most notably Cable & Wireless, known to be pioneering service self-provisioning systems.