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

To: djane who wrote (47793)	5/31/1998 12:01:00 PM
From: Dennis R. Duke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

I had asked our friends at Investor Relations about the competitive threat of LU enter our space. Here is a majority of the e-mail that I received in reply: Regarding the LU announcement of their Layer 3/Layer 4 IP Switch, I would say it is still too premature to gauge the impact of that product. The product is not expected to go into beta until the end of the year, with availability in 1999. Since it is a high speed IP switch, it will compete against other IP switches, primarily Cisco, Ascend, Bay and other smaller Layer 3 IP switch vendors. In this space, there are a couple of disadvantages that Lucent faces..... 1) Competing against incumbents -- Lucent may have good relationships with carriers on the telephony side (class 5 switches), but we currently do not see Lucent in competitive bids on the data networking side. This will change as Lucent becomes more competitive with their data products, however, Lucent is late in the game. Many of the large networking decisions are being made this year and once a vendor gets installed, it is very difficult to uproot an incumbent in a carrier network. 2) Lucent's data products are not yet "market proven" in the carrier space. This means that it will take sometime for the carriers to extensively test and gain a comfort level with the products before they consider deploying such a product. This also adds time....again, Lucent is late breaking into the carrier/data market. 3) Lucent's announcement claims over 120 gigabit backplane. We won't know until the product is put through its paces whether or not the switch can really scale to those high speeds. Its possible to put x-number of interfaces in a switch, count them up and decide the switch reaches x-speed. However, we'll have to wait and see if the performance of the switch holds when going fully loaded at full line speed. These are just thoughts off the top of my head. Generally speaking, Ascend is not standing still with regard to the competition. We are working on next generation platforms in Access, ATM and IP areas, as well as on the voice integration front. These are all areas where we will have new products available late 1998/1999. Sounds like our team is not running in fear, but is running an R&D shop that might do that to others. IMHO, (-8 Dennis 8-)

To: djane who wrote (47793)	6/1/1998 2:59:00 AM
From: djane	Respond to of 61433

ATM looks for niche in LAN/WAN market By Stephen Lawson InfoWorld Electric infoworld.com Posted at 5:30 PM PT, May 31, 1998 Asynchronous Transfer Mode, once considered the key to communicating across all networks, is expected to continue playing a role, albeit diminished, in LANs and WANs despite the increasing popularity of powerful and intelligent IP devices. However, many enterprises and service providers are looking to Gigabit Ethernet, optical networks, and emerging IP quality of service as alternatives to ATM's traditional strengths. "In the long term, we're interested in alternatives to ATM because we pay a significant overhead penalty for carrying ATM," said Vinton Cerf, senior vice president of MCI. "I'm quite convinced that we can implement similar functionality in other than ATM switches." MCI is planning to test Lucent's PacketStar IP Switch, introduced last week, as a possible solution. The Layer3/Layer 4 switch, which promises to route as many as 32 million packets per second, is among the first of what is expected to be a series of such large IP WAN devices. Despite this, vendors will use this week's ATM Year 98 conference in San Jose, Calif., to roll out next-generation products that will extend the capabilities of ATM. And observers said that for the foreseeable future, ATM will continue to be critical. "If you're a service provider and you have to handle both IP and other traffic, ATM is the best solution," said Ron Jeffries, principal analyst at Jeffries Research, in Arroyo Grande, Calif. Because ATM can transparently carry non-IP traffic, many service providers that turn to pure IP will maintain parallel ATM networks, he said. But IP and Ethernet are unlikely to match ATM's capability to carry voice, video, and data, another analyst predicted. "You'll be able to do 90 percent of what an ATM network delivers, but it'll never be as good as ATM on multimedia," said Michael Howard, president of Infonetics, in San Jose. "ATM is here for the long run, but it won't be the overall winner anywhere," Howard said. One technology analyst said his company uses ATM for WAN services in some cases but not in LANs. "We don't feel ATM inside the building is worth the expense," said Eric Kuzmack, a senior analyst at a Fortune 250 publishing company. A consortium of automotive companies recently set down parameters for determining whether ISPs can deliver the quality of service needed for high-availability and multiservice networks. The Automotive Industry Action Group is using the parameters to certify service providers that want to participate in its Automotive Network Exchange. At ATM Year 98, Cabletron will introduce the SmartSwitch 9500 as the first shipping product of a strategy to supply ATM hardware from the desktop to the carrier core. The 9500 finally brings to the SmartSwitch 9000, formerly the MMAC-Plus, the long-awaited Cell Transfer Matrix (CTM) ATM backplane. Cabletron said the passive backplane's throughput can scale beyond 75Gbps. The switch can be fitted with ATM modules that each include a 4.5Gbps switching fabric. Interfaces, available separately to plug in to the modules, include DS-3, OC-3, and OC-12. Officials said Cabletron will ship OC-48 interfaces for the modules in July. Each 9500 will ship with both the CTM and a packet-based backplane, allowing enterprises to mix Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI, and ATM on the same switch. The CTM can also be added to an existing MMAC-Plus or SmartSwitch 9000. The 9500 is available now, priced at $9,995 for a 14-slot chassis. Modules will cost about $19,000. General DataComm will enhance the voice-carrying capabilities of its Apex ATM switches. The carrier backbone switches will be able to compress a 64Kbps voice channel to 8Kbps using a standard ATM technology, AAL2. The higher compression ratio will allow service providers to carry voice traffic more efficiently, potentially lowering the cost to customers of leased connections across a WAN. Other companies offer 8Kbps compression capability today on their switches but only using a nonstandard method, according to industry observers. HyNex will announce it is adding voice support to its Hunt 7100 ATM Network Termination Unit, an ATM access device for customer sites that includes traffic shaping and WAN priority settings. The Hunt 7100 is designed for service providers to offer and bill for end-to-end quality of service. Cabletron Systems Inc., in Rochester, N.H., can be reached at (603) 332-9400 or cabletron.com. General DataComm Inc., in Middlebury, Conn., can be reached at (203) 574-1118 or gdc.com. HyNex Ltd., in Shefayim, Israel, is at hynex.com. Stephen Lawson is a senior writer for InfoWorld. en Copyright c 1998 InfoWorld Media Group Inc. InfoWorld Electric is a member of IDG.net

To: djane who wrote (47793)	6/1/1998 4:43:00 AM
From: djane	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

Cisco's Growth Rate Relies on New Markets, Asia, Chambers Says bloomberg.com Technology News Mon, 1 Jun 1998, 3:53am EDT BN 5/29 San Jose, California, May 29 (Bloomberg) -- Cisco Systems Inc.'s annual revenue growth will average more than 30 percent in the next three years only if ailing Asian economies rebound or a new market for Cisco's computer networking equipment takes off quickly, analysts and Chief Executive John Chambers said. Chambers has said he expects the company to average 30 percent to 50 percent annual growth over a three- to five-year period. That's higher than the overall industry growth rate, which most analysts peg at around 25 percent through 1999. Chambers said economic turmoil in Asia has made him ''cautious'' about the next 18 months. Echoing comments he made to analysts during a conference call May 5, he said Cisco would maintain 30 percent to 50 percent growth ''assuming reasonably good economic conditions.'' ''They had been expecting a lot of growth to come from Asia,'' said Jim Cottle, a technology analyst with the University of California Endowment and Employee Pension Fund, which owns more than 2 million Cisco shares. Although Cisco dominates sales of equipment that routes data on corporate computer networks, growth in its traditional market has slowed amid price competition from rivals including Bay Networks Inc. and 3Com Corp. While Bay, 3Com and Cabletron Sytems Inc. all saw profits decline last quarter, Cisco continued its unbroken string of quarterly gains in profits and sales. Still, because of Asia's downturn, Cottle expects the company's revenue to grow 25 percent this year, down from the 31.5 percent it has averaged in the past four quarters. Slower Orders in Asia Asian orders, including Japan, accounted for 11 percent of Cisco's bookings in the quarter ended in April, down from 16 percent in the year-earlier period. The company doesn't release a geographic breakdown for revenue, though it does for bookings, which are orders not yet paid for. Since Cisco released those figures, rioting in Indonesia has worsened that country's economic crisis and nuclear tests in India and Pakistan prompted the U.S. and other countries to impose economic sanctions. The sanctions include eliminating loan guarantees which help Indian companies buy goods from U.S. companies. ''Where economies are having trouble, we're having challenges,'' Chambers said in an interview last week. On the May 5 call, Chambers said pessimism among the Japanese business community over that country's economic prospects was the worst he had seen in more than a decade of visits there. With Asian sales falling, Cisco is looking for more growth from its two other geographic sales areas: the Americas and Europe, Africa and the Middle East. ''When you're running on three engines and one of them is broken, you've got to make it up with the other two,'' said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with CIBC Oppenheimer who rates Cisco ''buy.'' Telecommunications Market To reach 30 percent growth, Cisco will need an ''uptick'' in Asia and ''a good share'' of the nascent market for networking equipment sold to phone companies and Internet service providers, said Pyykkonen, who pegs Cisco's growth at 28 percent this year. The telecommunications carrier market is expected to grow to more than $50 billion annually by 2002 as ISPs and phone companies buy new equipment to handle surging Internet traffic. Chambers has said he wants at least 50 percent of Cisco's revenue to come from the carrier market by 2002. ''This market is growing faster than most people think,'' Chambers said. To get its share, Cisco will have to compete against new, larger rivals like Lucent Technologies Inc. and Northern Telecom Ltd., which traditionally have sold to telecom providers. --John Shinal in the San Francisco newsroom (415) 912-2995 /smw/pkc ------------------------------------------------------------------------ . cCopyright 1998, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved. The information herein was obtained from sources which Bloomberg L.P. and its suppliers believe reliable, but they do not guarantee its accuracy. Neither the information, nor any opinion expressed, constitutes a solicitation of the purchase or sale of any securities or commodities