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

To: Sector Investor who wrote (41114)	3/26/1998 11:21:00 AM
From: The Phoenix	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

Sector! What set you off? Don't get anal about ASND. Let's face it, networking stocks will do well for the forseeable future as network build out continues. You are partly right. CSCO has outsold everyone. As far as the rest, MRVC's growth is triple that of CSCO. 93% bottom line growth and 88% top line growth in 1997. CSCO can't hold a candle to that. You're comparing a company with a $60+B market cap to a company with a $600M market cap? Sector, you're smarter than that. I won't comment further. CSCO's GE is non-existent. CSCC kicks Stratacom's butt, and say did you notice all those ASND contracts with telcos and CLECs this year? I bet CSCO really wishes they could compete at OC-48 speeds before ASND locks them all up with contracts for the GX-550, but they are a year away, aren't they? How is CSCO's next quarter shaping up? Kind of flattish, no? Sector, again one should review history before condemning product strategies. CSCC certainly has done better in the RBOC's and STRM/CSCO have traditionally done better in the IXC's and internationally. One reason that CSCC/ASND made headway in the RBOC's was due to STRM's decision to not add SMDS interfaces to their switches. Since the RBOC's followed Bellcore's recommedation at the time and purchased a slew of SMDS switching equipment they were in a bind. They could either throw these switches away or adapt them. CSCC gave them the ability to adapt them and therefore got these accounts. In hindsight STRM made a huge mistake here. As far as speeds and feeds go, yes, CSCC/ASND have some advantages in some area's (mainly speeds) whereas STRM has an advantage on feeds - like integrated high density VTOA. This is why STRM was able to penetrate the enterprise market - where ASND/CSCC is non-existent. I could go on and on, the point is that there is space and markets for both products and CSCO appears to be doing very well with the STRM as of late. They recently won both US West and GTE....RBOC's! Gads! for the first time STRM is able to penetrate the RBOC's.. note they also have significant portions of PacBell's ISP NAP's. Oh well, you do have the most bloated stock price of all the networkers - but it will drop 10+ points sometime in the near future. Interesting opinion and an easy one to make....given that CSCO is trading at it's all time high versus ASND at 40% of it's high. Given this your guess is probably a good one, - there should definitely be more upside as a % in ASND. Problem is ASND focuses more on iron and not enough on value added differentiated s/w. Even so, I agree with you that ASND should do well...but I would never BET on Csco tanking...after all Cisco tanks...so does ASND... Oh yes, there's all those routers being collapsed and moved outwards because of switches. How ARE router sales these days, anyway? What does one do with all those routers after switches handle both switching AND routing and displace them? They are much too big for paperweights. Router are doing fine...not great...just fine. Many of them are being replaced by multifunction routers and some are being replaced by layer 3 switches. However, I would postulate that few customers will look to ASND for WAN access, and furthermore given CSCO's broad product line and aggressive trade in programs that these customer migrate to other Cisco products rather than away from Cisco. Better sell and buy ASND? No reason you can't own both... I do.. Gary