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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: joe who wrote (15466)	5/7/1998 1:39:00 AM
From: Mang Cheng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

Joe, wew! your posts are very long ! Just some feedback to what you said about F500 companies, Eric in quite a few interviews said that COMS are being invited to most of the F500 biddings these days - showing that big enterprises are coming to realize that coms is an end-to-end high-end suppliers too just like cisco. How many contracts they won though is questionable - most probably not that many so far. Eric said these in the context that Intel is not invited to these biddings. I think this should be a slow but relatively easy job for coms to break into the big-enterprise market. Coms has good and cheap products so it's only a matter of time large enterprise will buy from coms in volume. It's going to be slow since these companies all have tons of cisco products installed and it's much easier for them to add more cisco stuffs than to replace them with coms stuffs. I listened on Csco cc and the reason cisco thinks companies will still buy stuffs from cisco eventhough cisco stuffs are more expensive is that the Layer-3 switches from coms etc. are more switch-like, they don't handle all kinds of traffics and protocols like cisco routers and the new router switches. So their salesman/ladies can tell their customers - "OK, coms is cheap and fast, but it only handles this and this, but our Ciscoxxxx handles this and this plus this and this and this and this." If this myth is dispelled, than I think coms will get much more contracts. Also, I have talked to a couple of network guys in our company, their knowledge of Gigabit-ethernet and layer-3 switches are close to zero. They think cisco is THE suppliers of all these stuffs ! Lots of education is required and that's why I said it's going to be a painfully slow process. Mang

To: joe who wrote (15466)	5/7/1998 7:42:00 AM
From: Stockman_77079	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

Joe, I understand where you are coming from. I have recently spoke to our network guys, and I have to agree with Mang about the image thing. The thing about COMS' competitive pricing is an advantage. On the other hand, network infrastructure is a very important investment in a company's Data Processing structure. It's like a house's foundation. Most companies are not quite as price sensitive on networking equipment such as switches/routers. COMS has to make the world understand that their technology is better/on par with CISCO, not just cheaper. I think this is the toughest part of Eric B's job. regards,