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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (13651)	4/23/1998 12:46:00 PM
From: Diamond Jim	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

But, one question, if you have no position in either why are you posting comments that cry for a response or at a minimum a modicum of defense? -- Data gathering, may get some of one or the other or both. Any opinions ? jim

To: The Phoenix who wrote (13651)	4/23/1998 1:14:00 PM
From: The Phoenix	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 77400

Business WIRE Today BASKING RIDGE, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE) via NewsEdge Corporation -- AT&T said today a unique sequence of events triggered software flaws that caused last week's outage on its frame relay network. The flaws were activated by an operating procedure that proved inadequate to the specific configuration of one of the switches in the company's frame relay network. AT&T said the problem began when a computer command was issued to upgrade software code in one of the network switch's circuit cards. This created a faulty communications path that generated a large volume of administrative messages to other network switches. As a result, the other switches quickly became overloaded and stopped routing data from customers' applications for periods ranging from six to 26 hours before the network was fully restored. Following an exhaustive examination of the outage, *AT&T said it has changed its software upgrade procedures and will install updated software with safeguards that would have prevented* the outage. "This disruption certainly did not meet our customers' expectations for service reliability, or our own, and for that AT&T apologizes," said Chairman C. Michael Armstrong. "The applications that customers run on our frame relay network are mission critical for their businesses and we have taken steps to assure that this problem will not happen again." "Cisco agrees that whatever the cause, any service outage that disrupts customers' businesses is unacceptable," said John Chambers, president and CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc. "We will continue to support AT&T in meeting their customer commitments for the highest quality communications services." Cisco is the manufacturer of the switches in AT&T's frame relay network. AT&T said last week it would forgo charging frame relay customers until the company had isolated and confirmed the root cause of the problem and defined a fix. Armstrong said he expects that process to be completed shortly. Praising Cisco for its cooperation in identifying the root cause of the problem and designing a fix, Armstrong said: "We continue to have confidence in Cisco and its products." AT&T will share its analysis of the network outage with the FCC, the industry-wide Network Reliability Council, and other network providers. "By sharing this information and best practices," Armstrong said, "we will help customers avoid similar network outages no matter which carrier provides their frame relay service." ********* Interesting positioning on these comments. It sounds like AT&T did indeed try to do a network update without having the proper software installed! In fact, this reads like Cisco already had this software and that AT&T had not installed it...and is now agreeing to. Furthermore the comment: Praising Cisco for its cooperation in identifying the root cause of the problem and designing a fix, Armstrong said: "We continue to have confidence in Cisco and its products." Does not sound like a comment from a company that blames thier supplier for the loss a customers or the loss of revenue...and potentially positive mind share. IMO Gary