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

To: Stephen Torri who wrote (14351)	6/3/1998 3:07:00 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 77400

This is why I own CSCO, and none of the other telecommunications equipment companies: from today's WSJ: In March 1997, Sprint's engineers recommended that the brass "close the book entirely" on building traditional switching networks. Instead, says Mr. Brauer, the new network could give customers any-distance communications billed by the bit, not by the distance of the call. Rather than operate a "multiplicity" of phone and data networks, Sprint should "collapse" everything it runs into a single efficient system, the engineers advised. Two months later, Mr. Esrey told Mr. Brauer to assemble a team of Sprint's top technical and operations executives. The former president of Sprint Business, Mr. Brauer was now senior executive of Growth Initiatives. "We sweated writing press releases that wouldn't make it sound like Kevin was being demoted to some staff ... role without having to say what he was really up to," recalls Sprint's public-relations director Bill White. For three months they worked in a nondescript building with blacked-out windows in a suburb near its headquarters in a Kansas City, Kan., suburb. Mr. Brauer's team tapped the company's telecom suppliers, Northern Telecom Ltd. and Lucent Technologies Inc., for feedback. "We asked the suppliers 'Are we ahead of our time?' and they came back with, 'Gosh, this is big. It will take a lot of time,' " Mr. Brauer recalls, adding that some Sprint veterans didn't welcome the move, either. Cisco Systems Inc. plugged in quickly. The kingpin of Internet networking, Cisco told Sprint, "That's the way the world is going," Mr. Brauer says. "That was a very positive experience for us. It galvanized us." Sprint's project is certain to rattle the $250 billion telecom equipment and software industry. In choosing Cisco as the primary supplier and design coordinator of the network, Sprint has pushed aside traditional telecom suppliers.