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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications-News Only!!! (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Korn who wrote (777)	12/17/1997 10:45:00 AM
From: Tech Bull	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1629

Spencer Katt PC Week 12/16 (for what it's worth ....) www5.zdnet.com Ascend is having trouble pulling some projects over the goal line. Networking nabobs say that Ascend has been trying, unsuccessfully, to add voice modules to its MAX TNT carrier-class switch. The company's also having trouble formulating a high-end VPN strategy. It may be more successful, tipsters report, at entertaining acquisition offers.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (777)	12/17/1997 12:47:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOIL Lucent's Bell Labs and Nortel's Bell Northern Research are pushing their parents to the front of the telecom pack. By Jonathan Burke As recently as 1993, none of the telecommunications equipment companies was prepared to meet the needs of an industry in which customer demands were rapidly escalating. Among the six major players, Japan's Fujitsu and NEC were largely confined to Asia; France's Alcatel Alsthom was rocked by high-level ethics scandals and mismanagement, which culminated in a $5.2 billion loss in 1995; Germany's Siemens, with its dozens of diverse divisions, lacked focus; America's Lucent Technologies, then a division of AT&T, was often locked out of bids for business with AT&T's competitors; and Canada's Northern Telecom was in the midst of a management transition. Lucent and Nortel have since moved a step ahead of their European and Asian counterparts. Management changes, demand from North America, and contributions from Lucent's Bell Labs and Nortel's Bell Northern Research (now Nortel Technology), the world's pre‰minent R&D groups, have made these two companies the leading innovators in the telecommunications equipment space. According to Ken Kelly, an analyst with Northern Business Information, "The global giants like Alcatel and Siemens have been slower with innovations. Nortel and Lucent, at this point, are so close it's hard to pick a winner." Canadian bounties In just a few years, Nortel has expanded from a company that simply sold alternatives to Lucent's switching systems to become a major force, offering the full range of telco equipment, networking, and cellular products. The transformation is attributable in part to the recent reorganization of Bell Northern, whose $2 billion R&D budget funds 18,000 technologists in 38 labs. Nortel bills its researchers as the "practical geniuses of R&D" who develop products for immediate demand, in contrast to Lucent's highly theoretical research.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (777)	12/17/1997 12:51:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

For whom the Bell tolls, part II Though it lacks a full lineup of data networking products to go head-to-head with Cisco's, Nortel leads the telecom equipment vendors in data networking technology, particularly for WANs. Northern Business Information identifies Nortel as the world leader in deployed digital lines. Thus far, Nortel has substantially increased new business by beating Lucent into markets like frame relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode.[CSCC is indeed palatable to LU] This August, Nortel--along with Lucent and several other companies--made an investment in Juniper Networks, whose technology has been touted as the greatest threat to Cisco's router hegemony. Next to Ericsson and Motorola, Nortel has been the fastest innovator among the major telecom equipment companies in wireless technology. According to Clint McClellan of Dataquest, though Lucent held the lead in the 1996 U.S. market for both cellular and PCS, Nortel showed the strongest growth--more than 100 percent. Both Nortel and Lucent are targeting wireless as a major R&D priority. However, Jonna Till Johnson, a telecom equipment analyst with the Meta Group, suggests that because the wireless industry is still in the process of rolling out networks and negotiating spectrum allocation, rapid development of advanced technologies is not immediately necessary and any investments will pay off well down the road. Although Nortel has fixed the bugs that famously plagued its switches, software continues to be its greatest weakness. It is making significant headway in encryption technology, with help from its wholly owned subsidiary Entrust. However, compared with Bell Labs' towering software achievements--like the ubiquitous programming languages C and C++, and more recently Inferno, a highly anticipated multiplatform network operating system--Nortel's software efforts are far less ambitious.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (777)	12/17/1997 12:57:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

For whom the Bell tolls, part iii An acquisitive mood Lucent's R&D budget, at $2.7 billion, is about one-third larger than Nortel's. Although the company plans to keep its R&D budget at 11 percent of revenues, going forward it intends to make technology acquisitions a far greater priority. According to Lucent North America president Gerald Butters, "We spend too much internally. You will soon see a structural change at Lucent that will include a string of investments and a West Coast lab, because we realize we can't do it all ourselves."{LU has put the money where its mouth has been] Mr. Butters describes three priorities for Lucent's R&D machine. The first is photonic switching. (For more on photonic switching, see "Seeing the Light", and "Into the Light") By most accounts, Lucent is the world leader in this emerging science, in which data is encoded on packets of light. Ms. Johnson, however, warns that a long standards battle will prevent the technology from being deployed for at least a decade. R&D for improvements in current-generation networking is another priority for Lucent, albeit a lower one. The company acknowledges that it is largely skipping a generation of networking technology while it contemplates technologies that will merge voice and data. Even with such long-term planning, Lucent will meet fierce opposition in the highly competitive data networking market. For Lucent to gain better footing, some analysts have suggested that it should acquire its strategic partner Bay Networks.[It can't be BAY b/c LU has terminated the OEM agreement w/ BAY. Besides,LU already had Campus backbone ATM switches, GBE, and low-end RAS] Lucent's third area of concentration is software--and among the telecom equipment giants, it is dominant. Although the company's software development is wide ranging, Mr. Butters homes in on a single vision: the personal network. He describes this network rather vaguely, saying it will deploy agents and avatars with knowledge of users' preferences and adding that this is the sort of leading-edge technology Americans are coming to expect in their communications services. While many companies have been unable to find commercial success with such technologies, perhaps Lucent's resources and credibility will make the difference. As fast as these companies are moving, we can expect an answer any day now.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (777)	12/17/1997 1:04:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

For whom the Bell tolls, Part IV [But it lacks NW mgmt SW, Firewall & Security SW. ASND already had SecureConnect SW family,Navis NW mgmt SW family]

To: Gary Korn who wrote (777)	12/17/1997 9:10:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1629

Vickers Top Ten Direct Insider Holders for ASCEND COMMUNICATIONS INC Filer's Name Shares Held Market Value Held EVANS, ROGER L. 914,480 29,606,290 RYAN, ROBERT J. 524,412 16,977,839 SYMONS, JEANETTE 244,644 7,920,350 DAHL, ROBERT K. 227,928 7,379,169 SANFORD, CURTIS N. 207,703 6,724,385 DAHL, ROBERT 136,044 4,404,425 KRAMLICH, C. RICHARD 126,882 4,107,805 ATKINS, BETSY 104,672 3,388,756 SANFORD, CURTIS 87,596 2,835,921 LALLY, JAMES P. 53,602 1,735,365