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

To: mrclinton who wrote (51518)	8/4/1998 4:27:00 PM
From: bucky89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

How long will carriers go on tolerating this? They normally have a policy of dual sourcing. IOS, Cisco Powered Network - Intel Inside, everyone spot the obvious similarities here? Brand marketing as a result of a Competitor have a product just as good or better than yours, potentially pissing on you bonfire. Scuse the French. It's more than just marketing. Like I said, there's so much infrastructure that's built around Cisco's buggy IOS software that it would be prohibitively painful for us or any other large enterprise to switch. We have in-house programs and scripts that interface with the IOS. Technical staff are familiar with Cisco and Cisco only--retraining would be more costly than switching. And then of course there is marketing and the task of convincing management to go with a non-Cisco vendor. Carriers have the same problem. Right now, Cisco owns layer 3. While Ascend is stronger for the moment in layer 2, the battle is not over. My whole point with my last message is that Ascend is more vulnerable to attack from Cisco than Cisco is from Ascend. Cisco owns the enterprise market, and no one will take it away from them, period. The next battle will be for the carrier market, which is Ascend's home turf. If they lose it, then they will go the way of Novell. But so far so good. Ascend is beating Cisco, at least for the moment. They will when they need to start running voice over it, I'm not personally convinced TRUE IP on a traditional router backbone (7513, BLN etc ) will ever deliver this. May the NN products or the IGX gear but never a router. I agree. Carriers will do voice on layer 2. Enterprises will do it on layer 3. But carriers still have to do some layer 3 networking regardless, and they will still buy Cisco gear to do it.