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Technology Stocks : BAY Ntwks (under House) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (5460)	4/20/1998 6:13:00 PM
From: bgg	Respond to of 6980

Not sure if the ATT issue prompted the split order. While more and more organizations and ISPs are moving to consolidate their vendor portfolio (for reasons such as simplified customer support, etc.) I think there's always going to be resistance to putting all eggs in one basket. Ascend is known for low-balling prices. For someone like QWEST, having two major players as major suppliers helps keep the pricing under control since there's competition. Ascend plays in the ATM/FR space due to their acquisition of Cascade about 1 1/2 ago. Bay doesn't have any product offerings in the core WAN switching market. Therefore, I think the mere fact that they lack end-to-end product coverage hurts them. At the same time, Cisco plays in many more areas than Ascend, which probably helps for customers looking to simplify their vendor support. Bay's primary orientation and (reletive) strength is with enterprise customers. Unfortunately for Bay, they don't have the product portfolio, execution, customer service/support, sales staff, etc. to compete with Cisco. Bay is directly in Cisco's crosshairs and that almost always is a bad thing for the target.