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Technology Stocks : FORE Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Trevor Goodchild who wrote (8512)	5/6/1998 12:58:00 PM
From: Asymmetric	Respond to of 12559

Fore's ASX-1000 Switch Wins Technical Competition data.com Another good sign that Fore has excellent products. One of the things I like about the Intel/Fore deal is the possibility that Fore has found a true partner in Intel (giving Intel here the benefit of the doubt that they're not in it to just rip off Fore's technology). With Fore's partnership with Nortel, neither party seemed to either want to, or be able to, leverage the partnership. With Nortel developing their own competitive switch, I think their relationship with Fore was just a temporary alliance to allow Nortel to fill out their product line...ie buying time till they were able to develop their own competing ATM product. Maybe I am off-base here, but that is my read of their relationship. Intel has no competing ATM product, nor any under present development that I know of. I think we all understand that Intel's future success, that of selling ever higher speed, higher complexity, higher margined CPU's rests squarely on new applications like voice recognition, video, 3D graphics stuff, high speed Internet connections, etc. This is the essence of Intel's business model. It has been hugely successful for much of their past, and they are not ready to tear it down and restructure it along the lines of sub-$1000 commodity PCs. Anyway, all these applications rely on the ability to increase and manage huge increases in communications bandwidth. As was pointed out in the conference call yesterday, Gartner Research was quoted saying that just increasing the bandwidth alone is not going to provide the solution to future technology needs. The network needs to have more intelligence. What was once one of the drawbacks to ATM, the complexity of the installation from a software configuration standpoint, may actually turn out to be (another) one of ATM's strength - the ability to install and configure "intelligence" into the network itself. By intelligence, what I believe is meant is ATM's ability to priority cells & packets, either according to latency demands of the applications, customer willing to pay for premium service, etc, variable billability for Telcos and CLECs based on quality of service agreements, ability to rebuild calls in event of circuit/path failure, etc. In reality, Intel doesn't care whether ATM or Gigabit ethernet wins the day. Their main goal is to drive the bandwidth/ communications revolution, for if that succeeds, THEY will succeed, and with present business model intact to boot. My belief is they do not want to change this recipe of success - that of selling high margined, high end, and high investment CPUs. They will tinker with it so as to accomodate the low-end PC. But they realize that if the PC world stagnates, they lose. And so they have every reason to put some effort into this new agreement with Fore to make it work. If Fore wins, so will Intel. To me, that's a partnership where everybody wins. Peter.