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

To: Captain Jack who wrote (17034)	6/6/1998 9:12:00 PM
From: blankmind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

3Com guns for No. 1 Company banks on switch to real-time data. By Tim Greene Network World, 4/20/98 3Com Corp. thinks it holds all the cards it needs to shake up the rankings of the Big Four network equipment companies. And because 3Com already is No. 2, that leaves it with just one place to go - up - to the top spot tightly held by Cisco Systems, Inc. The company plans to rise by exploiting change. More specifically, 3Com sees networking changing from a landscape dominated by store-and-forward functions to one ruled by real-time applications such as voice and video. In 3Com's view, making the transition means imposing quality of service on real-time packets at the desktop and maintaining that quality as the packets make their way across carrier networks to distant devices. 3Com is working on such a network priority scheme, and a comprehensive management platform for it, but the company has its skeptics. "There is nothing to indicate 3Com is going to jump ahead of Cisco any time soon,'' says John Morency, an analyst with Renaissance Worldwide, a consultancy in Boston. Although 3Com's roadmap calls for quality assurance across the WAN, the company doesn't actually own any WAN switches, Morency notes. And while speed is key to real-time applications, 3Com for the moment is foregoing the gigarouters being developed by Cisco and other competitors, he says. But 3Com doesn't see those things as being problems, according to Ronald Sege, 3Com's senior vice president for enterprise systems and global products. For wide-area switching, 3Com is relying on alliances with Newbridge Networks, Inc. and Siemens Corp., and backs switch-based routing rather than software-based gigarouting. Relying on an alliance rather than outright ownership for wide-area switching poses two problems, according to Brad Baldwin, an analyst with International Data Corp., of Framingham, Mass. First, Newbridge could form alliances with 3Com's competitors. And second, Newbridge could be bought by someone else. But 3Com does not see Newbridge's and Siemens' independence as a problem, Sege says. "We have a good relationship with Newbridge now. I don't know what would be gained by [us acquiring Newbridge],'' he says. Cisco, however, already owns a successful line of carrier-class switches. 3Com TRUMP CARDS 3Com says its trump card is the hardware-based CoreBuilder 9000, which is an enterprise switch-router with LAN and WAN interfaces. 3Com claims the device is 10 times as fast and a tenth the cost of traditional routers. Cisco lacks this type of device, which 3Com already has for sale. But Morency says the CoreBuilder 9000 will not topple Cisco. The product will sell well, as will new SuperStack remote access gear and 10M/100M bit/sec Ethernet network interface cards (NIC), he predicts. "But I don't see a gain of $2 billion to blast by [3Com's] competitor,'' Morency says. Cisco last year posted revenue of $7.3 billion. The bulk of 3Com's business lies in NICs and modem products. Modems, however, have not been an easy business lately. 3Com bought its way into modems when it picked up U.S. Robotics' offerings last year in a $6.6 billion stock swap.With the deal has come the usual loss of momentum for both companies as they try to become one, according to Baldwin. 3Com also bought itself a chunk of the 56K bit/sec modem standards battle. Despite pitching U.S. Robotics' proprietary fast modems, 3Com has won a good slice of the early adopter market. With a preliminary standard finally in place, the challenge now lies in capturing an even bigger share of the fast modem market. At the same time, the merger meant making management of U.S. Robotics' Total Control remote access concentrator possible through 3Com's Transcend management software. This should be accomplished this year. U.S. Robotics hardware already has been adapted and integrated into 3Com's SuperStack Access 3000. Meanwhile, 3Com is going forward with its end-to-end quality-of-service technology. The company is giving its network hardware the intelligence to establish classes of services at the desktop that can be extended across the LAN and WAN. In 3Com's scheme, intelligence in the NIC establishes a class of service and, via an extension of Multi-Protocol over ATM, that request is passed along by other LAN devices to ATM switches in the WAN. Despite the difficulties, Sege says he is look-ing for this year to be of historic importance for the company. "I want people to look back 10 years from now and say Cisco was the IBM of networking, and along came 3Com and Cisco became the Digital Equipment Corp. The world changed from sending e-mails around and doing file transfers to making telephone calls,'' Sege says.

To: Captain Jack who wrote (17034)	6/7/1998 1:14:00 AM
From: joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

John, >>I also believe the 35 range is not far away if numbers are made by even $.005.<< I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean if it makes at least any positive earnings? Or do you mean if it makes + or - $.005 from First Call estimates? It sounds like, you think it'll hit 35 as long as it doesn't take a loss this quarter. >>The last I was watching ORCL it was at 32 1/2 when I went to sleep and 24 when the computer was turned on in the morning.<< I remember that. Something like this could start making a person afraid to go to sleep at night <g> j