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 : Ascend Communications-News Only!!! (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DHB who wrote (1568)	10/14/1998 10:07:00 AM
From: Duke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1629

VERTICAL SYSTEMS GROUP DECLARES ASCEND THE MARKET LEADER IN THE Service Provider Segments Business Editors and Computer Writers ALAMEDA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 1998--Ascend Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:ASND), a leader in wide area networking (WAN) solutions for providers and users of the public network, today announced that a report from Vertical Systems Group confirmed that Ascend is the number one vendor in the Frame Relay and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) market for public carriers. According to this report issued by Vertical Systems last week, Ascend not only continues to lead the public WAN market, but has increased its market share in Frame Relay and ATM in the carrier and Internet Service Provider (ISP) markets. According to the Vertical Systems report, Ascend leads the combined ATM and Frame Relay service provider equipment segment with 26.4 percent market share for 1998, surpassing the competition for the first time and achieving the highest market share gain among all vendors highlighted in the report. Ascend is the only vendor among the current top three that gained market share in ATM revenue in 1998 to both carriers and ISPs. Ascend also had the highest market share gains among all vendors in the same categories for Frame Relay revenue. In addition, Ascend remains the top revenue generator in Frame Relay sales to the carrier and ISP segments extending its shares to 29.7 percent and 41.7 percent of the respective markets. "The growth of the Internet and transition of WANs from private lines to public networks has created a strong demand for high performance solutions in public networks," said Rick Malone, Principal for Vertical Systems. "This demand has fueled an expansion in the Frame Relay and ATM markets, and our research illustrates that Ascend has been successful in gaining market share in the carrier and ISP segments." "Our focus continues to be on providing the world's best carrier-class Multiservice ATM, Frame Relay and IP WAN switching technology for the New Public Network," said Dr. Hassan Ahmed, executive vice president and general manager, Core Systems Division of Ascend. "Our continued leadership and impressive gains in the Frame Relay and ATM markets are solid evidence that we are offering carriers and ISPs the world's strongest WAN solutions. This report from Vertical Systems further verifies our market strategy and success." The Vertical Systems report release on October 8 is the latest among numerous studies that have recently confirmed Ascend's number one position in the WAN switching market. According to a recent report from Dell'Oro Group, Ascend was the revenue leader in both the carrier and ISP multiservice WAN edge markets for the first half of 1998. Additionally, Cahners In-Stat Group recently pronounced Ascend the new leader in worldwide ATM WAN equipment revenue sold to service providers, as well as the continued leader in worldwide market share in combined ATM WAN equipment and Frame Relay switch revenue sold to service providers, total Frame Relay switch revenue and Frame Relay switch revenue sold to service providers through the first half of 1998. Recent reports from International Data Corp. also placed Ascend as number one in both worldwide WAN switch sales and overall worldwide Frame Relay switch revenues in 1997. About Ascend Communications Ascend Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:ASND) develops, manufacturers, sells and services wide area networking solutions for telecommunications carriers, Internet service providers and corporate customers worldwide. For more information about Ascend and its products, please visit the Ascend Web site at www.ascend.com, or send e-mail to info@ascend.com. For Investor Relations, please call our communications hotline at 800/648-3059 or 760/704-4423 (outside the US & Canada). Additional investor information can also be accessed on our Web site at: ascend.com. Ascend is headquartered at One Ascend Plaza, 1701 Harbor Bay Parkway, Alameda, Calif. 94502; phone is 800/ASCEND4 and fax is 510/814-2300. The foregoing statements may contain forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from these expectations as a result of factors including, but not limited to, the Company's success in developing, introducing or shipping new products, competition, the mix of distribution channels employed, the Company's dependence on single or limited source suppliers for certain components used in its products, risks inherent in international sales, seasonality and general economic conditions. These and other factors are discussed in Ascend's 10-K, 10-Q and other filings made periodically with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

To: DHB who wrote (1568)	10/17/1998 6:27:00 PM
From: DHB	Respond to of 1629

Ascending The Remote Access Ladder -- Kurt Bauer, Ascend Communications, VP of Access Product Marketing Ascend Communications has been at the heart of the explosive growth in the service provider access field for years. The company's early success came from inverse multiplexing, but its portfolio quickly expanded to include access routers and access concentrators like its MAX and MAX TNT lines, which are widely used in the ISP community. Today's IT managers are looking for services like voice over IP and virtual private networking; they're also demanding guarantees on these services. As a result, Ascend, like its hungry competitors, is trying to expand its reach into the converged voice/data networks. InternetWeek editor-at-large Salvatore Salamone recently got a chance to talk about the changing market with Kurt Bauer, Ascend's vice president of access product marketing. Here are the highlights of that discussion. InternetWeek: How is the access market changing today? Bauer: The service providers want everything-voice, fax, DSL, frame relay-in as few boxes as possible. InternetWeek: What specifically are they looking for? Bauer: The service providers want to know how products fit into context with the new public network that includes the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet. And they want to know how a solution helps with service features like quality of service. InternetWeek: Are service providers just looking for gateways to link between the two networks? Bauer: All of our customers are saying, "Infrastructure is important, but I need solutions." InternetWeek: So this goes well beyond simply providing access products? Bauer: Yes. We used to have point announcements-I call them vertical silos. Now we are trying to pull these things together. InternetWeek: We're obviously seeing a convergence between the Internet and PSTN. How does this change things? Bauer: With the new public network, the brains are integrated within the body of the network. So we need SS7 and intelligent [call handling] to provide call control. InternetWeek: Was this the incentive behind Ascend's acquisition of Stratus? Bauer: Yes, it's part of it. But the Stratus products are not the big news. We already had OEM agreements. It's the people with PSTN experience that are key. About 450 people will come from Stratus. InternetWeek: What type of applications are coming out of the integration of the PSTN/Internet networks? Bauer: We have providers like Deutsche Telekom doing PC-to-phone trials. Voice providers can use the Internet to start doing some cost avoidance. And fax over the Internet also is a big application. InternetWeek: How important is intelligent call handling in all of these applications? Bauer: The quality of the services will be key to people using them. Grandma isn't going to care about any of this; she just wants dial tone. InternetWeek: Let's talk about convergence of another kind. It seems IT managers want providers to mix what have previously been separate offerings like high-speed access and VPNs. Are you seeing that, too? Bauer: Yes. We recently had a provider, BCS in South Africa, that combined VPN and DSL. InternetWeek: Any interest in other high-speed access technologies? Bauer: We also have worked with some providers that wanted to combine VPNs and cable modem services. InternetWeek: How is all of this different from the approach taken by other access equipment vendors? Bauer: Many vendors have combined access and backbones. They have put in switches and tried to deliver QoS features. We're offering multiservice delivery on a single infrastructure. We're combining solutions with core switching technology and management. InternetWeek: It seems like ISPs and IT managers need help deploying some of these new services. Is that an issue for Ascend? Bauer: Yes. Integration services are becoming very important. We will be making some announcements next month about global integration service offerings. InternetWeek: We've talked about Ascend offering solutions. Can you provide an example? Bauer: One example is network wholesaling, where a large provider supplies the access ports for clients of a smaller service provider. InternetWeek: How does Ascend fit into this picture? Bauer: It's our combination of access equipment, security ser-vices and management features that lets a provider make available and [get revenue for] ports wholesaled out to another provider. InternetWeek: Is there anything else on Ascend's horizon that we should be looking at on the remote access front? Bauer: Cable is on our radar. We already have routers in cable networks. techweb.com

To: DHB who wrote (1568)	10/17/1998 6:38:00 PM
From: DHB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1629

Frame relay blends QoS with speed Praveen Goli, Product Marketing Manager, Ascend Communications Inc., Alameda, Calif. Frame relay, the veteran high-bandwidth technology of network infrastructures, is keeping pace with the demands of the new public network by adding high-speed capability, capacity enhancements and quality guarantees. And, as service providers build networks optimized for data traffic, these new capabilities will help offer services to a dynamic and growing customer base. The speed and capacity improvements come largely as a result of the emerging Frame Relay over Sonet (Frosonet) and Multi-Link Frame Relay (MLFR) standards. Frosonet provides specifications for frame relay to run at OC3/STM-1 or OC12/STM-4 speeds, while MLFR provides an incremental capacity jump for customers that are outgrowing T1 but are not ready for the speed or expense of DS3/E3 lines. The frame relay quality-of-service (QoS) capability will help service providers meet increasing demands for such things as Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Customer Network Management (CNM). Expected to be approved by the end of the year, the Frosonet standard maintains traditional frame relay advantages, such as the ability to engineer the use of bandwidth in the backbone and to lower overhead costs, while adding a number of benefits for service providers. For example, the standard includes the same High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) over Sonet mapping that is being used for Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) over Sonet (PoS). This saves costs by allowing the same hardware to be used for both PPP and frame relay interfaces. The standard brings Sonet protection-switching capabilities to frame relay. Basically, the MLFR adds scalability to frame relay networks, thus helping service providers keep pace with growing traffic demands and to extend services to customers. Typically, adding capacity beyond T1 and E1 lines involved provisioning a DS3/E3 line or using external inverse multiplexing equipment (IMUX) and was very costly. MLFR, by taking a software-based approach to providing higher-capacity frame relay access, is significantly more cost-effective and easier to deploy. MLFR trunks are now available that combine multiple physical links between switches within the public network into a single higher-capacity logical facility. In the near future, MLFR will be available for User-to-Network Interface (UNI) connections as well. The aggregated links created through MLFR can be thought of as a single logical link to bridge the gap between T1/E1 and DS3/E3. For example, if a specific connection requires a 6-Mbit/second link, then a DS3/E3 line at 45 Mbits/s clearly results in wasted bandwidth, while a 1.5-Mbit/s T1/E1 line is not enough. With the MLFR, four T1/E1 lines can be logically linked to offer what appears to be a single 6-Mbit/s connection. This increases network capacity and maximizes bandwidth without unnecessary operations costs. By bridging the gap between T1/E1 and DS3/E3, the MLFR standard allows network service providers to extend their service geography into areas that otherwise would not be justifiable. For example, a service provider might wish to offer frame relay services in new locations, but decides not to because it lacks DS3/E3 trunks in that location. With the MLFR, the provider can offer the new location NxT1/E1 service without incurring the cost of a DS3/E3 trunk. Where the Frosonet and MLFR enable frame relay technology to meet the speed and capacity demands of the new public network, QoS capability enables frame relay to move beyond basic services. For example, revenue-generating services such as SLAs allow customers to select only the services they need. And service providers now can also use frame relay as a platform for offering a broader range of applications. Some of these include Systems Network Architecture (SNA), voice over frame relay and premium Internet access. In the case of SNA, there are more than 1 million ports still using leased lines. QoS capability with SLAs removes the last barrier that has kept many SNA users from moving to public frame relay networks and opens up a huge potential market. techweb.com