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Technology Stocks : FORE Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Igor Nasonov who wrote (7384)	2/17/1998 8:44:00 AM
From: Igor Nasonov	Respond to of 12559

A funny thing happened on the way to the morgue... SINGAPORE, 1998 FEB 13 (Newsbytes) -- By InternetWorld Asia Edition. Proponents of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), the high-speed networking technology that was thought to have been run out of the enterprise last year by the Gigabit Ethernet crowd, has refused to concede the battle for the corporate backbone to the newest generation of Ethernet technology. In fact, analysts and industry insiders say, the future continues to look bright for ATM in the enterprise. "All the gloom and doom over ATM has pretty much been an exaggeration," says John Armstrong, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., a San Jose research firm. Armstrong's comments are directed at recent reports predicting that ATM's days within the corporate network were numbered. With Gigabit Ethernet, the 1,000-megabit-per-second version of the technology that controls about 80 percent of enterprise networks in the world, speeding its way through standardization and destined to assume its role at the core of the corporate network, ATM was essentially dead in the enterprise. At least that was the way things were expected to go. A funny thing happened on the way to the morgue, however. Network equipment providers discovered that ATM in the enterprise has not only a pulse but a good chance of leading a productive existence. The market for ATM-based switches for the local area network (LAN), where the technology speeds data at rates ranging from 25 Mbps to 655 Mbps, is expected to expand an average of 49 percent annually between 1997 and the year 2000, according to In-Stat Inc., a Scottsdale, Arizona, research firm. In-Stat pegs the ATM enterprise equipment market in the year 2000 at US$2.75 billion. Recent financial numbers turned in by FORE Systems Inc. (http://www.fore.com ), a leading provider of enterprise-based ATM equipment, offer additional evidence that there's plenty of room for both ATM and Gigabit Ethernet in enterprise backbones. In the quarter ended December 31, 1997, FORE recorded revenue of US$122.1 million, an 11 percent increase over the US$109.7 million recorded in the prior quarter. Net income was even more impressive, a 44 percent increase to US$10.1 million from US$7 million in the year-earlier period. "Frankly, we were scared about the Gigabit Ethernet stuff. But we're just not seeing it," says Michael Zock, director of technology at FORE. Among other things, Zock attributes Fore's healthy quarter to the fact that ATM, after years of suffering from a lack of standards and incompatibility problems, represents a more reliable networking technology than Gigabit Ethernet. While the ATM Forum, the governing body that oversees the drafting of ATM-based compatibility standards, recently finalized a series of crucial specifications that enable ATM and Ethernet to coexist on the same network, the Gigabit Ethernet standard is still several months away from completion. Reported by Newsbytes News Network newsbytes.com (19980213) Good Investing, Igor