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

To: scott maragioglio who wrote (42200)	4/4/1998 7:45:00 PM
From: The Phoenix	Respond to of 61433

No sweat Scott, AT&T and GTE surely do have an eclectic mix of equipment now. <g> The next playing field is multiservice though...and I fear that ASND is lagging here. True ASND looks well positioned to continue to sell iron, but the big margins are shifting to service. This isn't meant to diminsh their wins at GTE or AT&T, it's merely an attempt to highlight an issue which ASND needs to address if they want to grow earnings. Also, did UBS make note of the fact that GTE continues to purchase cisco routers? What really happened here? It looks like ASND won back an RBOC that Cisco had "stolen" from them. So, we're back to status quo here. At AT&T however the story is different. Although AT&T continue to roll out gob's of Cisco/StrataCom frame relay edge switches ASND stole and continues to hold the backbone from Cisco. From experience I know that AT&T is a demanding customer and over half of StrataCom engineering resources were devoted to making AT&T happy which limited their ability to go after other markets and business. Of course Cisco isn't dealing with this problem on the edge since these issues were handled years ago with StrataCOm. I wonder if ASND is consumed with supporting AT&T and I wonder if a mistake will open the window for a competitive product. My point: It's this inability to keep up with AT&T demands that opened the window for ASND and allowed them to win the backbone from Cisco/StrataCom. Just a something to consider... I'm sure Sector will have his way with this one. In closing I'm not excusing losing business as a political issue although politics do have a play. I know some people believe that god is good and all executives run around with halo's on and are most conncerned with their constituents and customers...but guess what that's not always the case. But business is lost due to mistakes whether technical, political, or implementation. Take heed and take a broad position in the networking sector. This is a great sector to be in...don't get married to a stock because of a win or two and certainly not because of a product announcement. Play the sector and you'll be rewarded. Gary (not Korn)