Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Nortel Networks (NT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: devans who wrote (581)	8/5/1998 3:21:00 AM
From: Johnny Canuck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14638

Nortel's Chief Says Bay Buy Widens Its Net Date: 8/5/98 Author: Michele Hostetler Northern Telecom Ltd. has widened its net to nab more customers. The Canadian maker of telecommunications gear is riding the convergence of voice networks (generally wide-area networks) and data networks (generally local-area networks). Companies want to buy all of their networking equipment from one firm. Nortel is working to be that firm. In June, it revealed plans to buy Bay Networks Inc. in a $7 billion stock swap. The merger is expected to close next month. Nortel's second-quarter revenue rose 12% to $4.16 billion. Profit from continuing operations rose 33% to $356 million, or 68 cents a share. Nortel Chief Executive John Roth recently spoke with IBD about how Bay Networks will change his company. IBD: How will Nortel change after it buys Bay? Roth: We've been in the wide-area-networking business for a few years. When we came up against the competition, while we'd win the technical evaluation, the customer would turn to us and say, ''That's really nice. You have a good wide-area-network product. Now what do I do for routers and the rest of the LAN (local-area network)?'' We'd say, ''We don't do that stuff. You have to go and talk to (a LAN company).'' (Our competitor) would say, ''We have this wide-area-networking product and LAN products, too. Why don't we just sell you a bundle, end to end, all tidy?'' We'd end up losing a lot of potential business. Even though we had been selected (for the WAN piece), during the process of the customer going out and getting the rest of what he needed, we'd end up being taken out of play. Likewise, Bay found themselves in similar situations. Bay has all the LAN gear, but didn't have the wide- area-networking products. IBD: How does the Bay purchase play into voice-data network convergence? Roth: I think the voice and data convergence is something we need to pay a lot of attention to. We also need to watch that we don't get carried away with a technology agenda. The way I look at it right now is that Nortel - once we acquire Bay - will be in a phenomenal position because we will have routing, circuit, fiber-optic and wireless technologies. Voice over IP (Internet protocol, for moving information on the Internet) is really lucrative as long as long-distance rates are high (for conventional phone calls). The voice bits travel at eight times the price of a data bit. In a transoceanic call, that premium is even higher. Voice over IP for international calling is an area where people can do what I call ''rate arbitrage'' - buy the capacity as if it were data, then put voice over it and have the voice travel at data rates, which would save you a ton of money. If the voice quality is a little bit worse than what you're used to, you're . . . getting this for less than 10% of what it would cost for a voice call. However, if you're looking in North America, long-distance rates (for regular phone calls) are coming down so fast that people look at it and think: How much am I really saving? Will I mess up the image I have with my customers in terms of being a quality company (because Internet voice quality lags)? I think the jury is out in my mind about how fast voice over IP will really grow. It still has technical issues. IBD: When will the quality problems of Internet calls be solved? Roth: We're going to start solving them with the transoceanic calls first. That reduction in price is really profound. I think that's the early market. Then the technology will improve from there. We put voice over our networks starting about four years ago. It took us about 18 months to make voice over ATM (asynchronous transfer mode, a common data networking technology) transparent to the user. It probably will take that long to do the same with voice over IP. But ATM is a technology designed from the outset to put voice, video and data over it. IP was never designed from this perspective . . . so we have bigger issues to work out. I figure it's going to take the industry 15 months to resolve those issues. It might take longer. IBD: What do your customers want from the Internet? Roth: This concept of having a highly reliable network that you can put commerce onto (and) that you can build your intranet (internal, Internet-based network) with and connect your sales force, your customers, your marketing organization and order entry. That is what everyone's asking for. I was with Microsoft the other night. We were talking about the availability of Microsoft's (e- mail program) Exchange. I said, ''How many nines in your availability?'' (How reliable is the system?) They said, ''We're up to 99.92 (out of 100).'' I said, ''Nortel will run 99.92 on a bad week. We'll hit 99.97 on a better week.'' With 99.92, it means a company the size of Nortel could have a couple thousand people out of commission at any given point in time. If we asked that question six to eight months ago, people would say, ''Why are you asking that? Availability of the e-mail system isn't that important.'' The electronic-mail system has gone from something that was faster than the regular mail to now if it goes down, the CIO gets fired. (C) Copyright 1998 Investors Business Daily, Inc. Metadata: NT BAY MSFT I/4890 I/3574 I/3270 E/IBD E/SN1 E/TECH