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

To: Arnold Layne who wrote (20248)	8/6/1998 7:57:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Respond to of 45548

"University Builds For The Future" Amy K. Larsen August 03, 1998, Issue: 726 Sometimes you have to spend money to save money. That's the lesson Widener University learned from the upgrade its IT department undertook to make the school's network infrastructure ready for the next century. Two years ago, the Pennsylvania-based teaching college set out to improve its educational environment by leveraging emerging technology-without increasing its costs over time. Ultimately, the school wanted to integrate voice, video and data to offset the physical distance between its three campuses in two states. "In our needs analysis, we decided we wanted to use more conferencing and [other multimedia applications] like streaming video, but to do that we had to build an entirely new infrastructure to support it," said Gary Habermann, director of technical resources at the university. Habermann's team got the green light on the project that would update its infrastructure to give all 7,500 students ready access to the campus network, whether they were in the classroom, the computer lab or the dorm room. But the university's IT department was looking for a backbone that also could fulfill quality-of-service requirements for time-sensitive applications as the university expanded its multimedia apps. The technology answer was to construct a fully switched Ethernet/ATM network. So, Habermann's group wrote a request for proposal and solicited the top internetworking vendors. With manageability and support issues near the top of Widener's requirements list, Habermann was looking for a single vendor to supply a common architecture that eventually could carry voice, video and data communications. And his group needed it fast. "We had a fixed amount of money to work with in our budget, but we had just about a year to get 5,500 ports connected and to go live with the new hardware and software," Habermann said. In the end, 3Com won out over the competition based on the vendor's commitment to meeting the school's deadlines, the depth of its ATM and switched Ethernet offerings, and the company's management capabilities. "You don't want to go out and make an investment like this without something like RMON [remote monitoring]. Otherwise, you are blind to what is happening on the network and there is no way you can make sure you are operating at peak efficiency," Habermann said. Widener has 3Com's RMON agents and its Transcend management system monitoring the school's network. The network uses 24 CoreBuilder 7000 ATM switches to provide 155-Mbps links to 165 SuperStack II 1000 switches and Fast Ethernet links to 125 SuperStack II Desktop Switches. Two CoreBuilder 3500 Layer 3 switches handle all the VLAN routing. Widener is future-proofing its investment by adding to its data center two new CoreBuilder 9000 switches that will expand its port density and Layer 3 switching, and support OC-12 speeds. With what Habermann called "incredible" vendor support during design, testing and deployment, Widener beat its deadline by two weeks. Up and running since last September, the infrastructure is paying for itself with reliability, speed, and tangible as well as intangible cost savings, Habermann said. "Where we didn't have the bandwidth before to deliver applications, we do now. And, through consolidation, we are actually saving money," he said. techweb.com Mang

To: Arnold Layne who wrote (20248)	8/8/1998 10:36:00 AM
From: Arnold Layne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 45548

From The Motley Fool message board: Subject: Re: Above average Date: Fri, Aug 7, 1998 22:59 EDT From: Frasertown Message-id: <1998080802595300.WAA18021@ladder01.news.aol.com> Solomon Smith Barney met with 3Com Thursday and came away "very encouraged" by the dialogue - said "all aspects of 3Coms business were up; modems up strong, channel inventories down even lower than they had expected (wow! never thought I would hear that!), Palm Pilot sales strong, qtr earnings should be on target or better." As a result, Smith Barney raised their short term to strong buy and said they have a short term target of $32 and year end of $40-45. Good stuff!