Ascend to open its philippine operations in June
CEBU CITY, PHILIPPINES, 1998 FEB 27 (NB) -- By Jennifer B.
Malapitan, Metropolitan Computer Times.
Ascend Communications Inc. [NASDAQ:ASND]
is set to establish its Philippine operations in June this year even
while seeking to create and strengthen its systems integration and
reseller channels in the country.
Kenneth Chan, Ascend's general manager for South Asia, in a press
workshop held here over the weekend, said that the establishment of a
Philippine subsidiary is part of the enterprise networking company's
move "to support the exploding ASEAN Internet market."
Chan noted that South Asia, which includes Singapore, the ASEAN,
Pakistan, and India, accounted for 30% of Ascend's Asia Pacific
revenues in 1997. The company's US$ 1.16 billion net sales for 1997,
however, was not specifically broken down per region.
Other indicators, which make the vendor bullish about the potential
of the region, include increasing PC sales, infrastructure upgrades,
as well as the availability of high capacity voice service (T1, E1,
R2, ISDN, PRI).
Chan vowed to create a professional management team in the
Philippines, which will focus on the localization of products and
marketing materials. Ascend will also exert efforts to educate the
market to increase market awareness.
It should be noted that three of the leading networking vendors, 3Com,
Cisco, and Bay Networks, have already established their Philippine
operations. While Ascend directly and indirectly competes with these
three vendors depending on industry segment and product propositions,
company officials are emphatic that Ascend is targeting a very niche
market, which is enterprise remote networking for telecommunication
companies and Internet service providers (ISPs).
In the Philippines, Ascend users include Infocom Technologies, Inc.,
the ISP arm of leading telco Philippine Long Distance Telephone
Company (PLDT); SkyInternet, the ISP arm of Lopez-backed telco
BayanTel/ICC; Mosaic Communications, the country's first commercial
ISP; Globe Telecom, Nestle, Smart Communications and retail chain SM
Shoemart.
Mosaic Communications' public frame relay network currently has
three nodes in the country: one each in Manila, Cebu and Davao, was
built using Ascend's frame relay products.
Ascend lays claim to being the recognized leader in high-speed
switched access products, citing a 1996 Dell'Oro Group report that
attributed 54% of the total WAN access concentrator ports, both
analog and digital, sold worldwide to Ascend's MAX WAN access switch
family.
Meanwhile, Jeff Gustafson, Ascend's marketing manager for Asia
Pacific, cited a forecast made by US carrier MCI that data traffic
will overtake voice traffic in the year 2000 mainly due to the
Internet.
This scenario offers an opportunity for frame relay or ATM network
access equipment vendors like Ascend. A number of carriers in the
world which have networks built to handle voice using
circuit-switched, 64K line in a time division multiplexing (TDM)
network, will reportedly have to install frame relay or ATM equipment
to accommodate data traffic.
"I see a future where your Internet protocol (IP) address will be your
telephone number," Gustafson said, citing that IP can save a lot of
cost primarily because a user would only need a browser to develop
internal information. Likewise the need to use only Internet tools in managing the network significantly reduces cost.
Gustafson also added that IP is the protocol to deal with particularly
for the proprietary SNA protocol. The good news, however, is that
Ascend's products accommodate SNA in IP-based networks.
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