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

To: H James Morris who wrote (59283)	5/6/2002 6:27:10 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 77400

A Flat Quarter For Cisco? It Could Be Worse May 6, 2002 Down but not out, vendor readies products and buys two companies By John Rendleman Cisco Systems, the one-time Wall-Street darling for its unstoppable revenue growth and its penchant for gobbling up companies, continues to hold investors' attention. Today, though, that's more because Cisco is the only major networking vendor that's at least treading water. Quarterly earnings, released this week, will show if the company is still able to outperform rivals. Cisco's third-quarter revenue is going to be "a little better than the bottom of the forecast range," predicts Jim Kelleher, an analyst at Argus Research. That would be flat or slightly higher than the $4.82 billion it reported in the previous quarter. Delivering on the forecast would indicate that Cisco is weathering this difficult year. "In this absolutely horrendous time in the communications industry, not to collapse deserves high praise," Kelleher says. Cisco is also expected to launch several content-networking and-security products this week at the NetWorld+ Interop conference in Las Vegas. Last week, the company debuted 14 routers in its access portfolio, ranging from its $350 Soho 71 Ethernet router to its $12,000 3745 Application Router, which handles business data services. The routers are designed for branch offices, remote workers, and telecommuters. Cisco also enhanced its 7300-, 7400-, 7500-, and 7600-series routers, expanding the types of sites at which they can be used. Like many in its market, Cisco had pinned future revenue growth on sales to emerging telcos and Internet service providers, only to see them fold. "Cisco put extra resources into trying to attack the service-provider market at a time when it wasn't apparent that the bottom was going to fall out of that market," says Joel Conover, an analyst with Current Analysis. Cisco hasn't given up on carriers. It's moving into new areas such as voice over IP, storage routers, and even optical networking. But none of this has been at the expense of its stalwart networking business. Cisco says it's buying the remaining portions of two technology companies in which it has minority stakes: The vendor will trade $258 million in common stock for the rest of Hammerhead Networks Inc. and Navarro Networks Inc.