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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flickerful who wrote (3613)	10/15/1998 12:41:00 AM
From: Ed Perry	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

>> Call them guerrilla ISPs << Picked this one out of the references: "It's a jungle out there. Ask all those ISPs locked in combat for corporate customers. With so many potential deals (and dollars) at stake, the only credo that counts is kill or be killed. And the arrival of a new breed of smaller ISPs (internet service providers) might only intensify the fighting. These new players are young. They're hungry. And they're ready to offer customers a way around 'Net congestion with a range of performance-boosting enticements—from private peering arrangements to proprietary routing to data centers. They're also delivering services for a fraction of what big,established players like MCI Communications Corp. (Washington, D.C.), Sprint Corp.(Kansas City, Mo.), and Uunet echnologies Inc. (Fairfax, Va.) charge. Call them guerrilla ISPs. And like any rebel force, they've been quick to win their sympathizers. Norman Estigoy, president of regional ISP Mica.Net Ltd. (Southfield, Mich.), is one of them. As a customer of Savvis Communications Corp. (St. Louis), he's seen big performance improvements. "We're getting packets from Southfield to Chicago in 16 milliseconds. It takes 30 to 40 milliseconds longer with Sprint's IP service," he says. Barry Volts, MIS manager at manufacturer Omron Electronics Corp. (Schaumburg, Ill.) and customer of Savvis, is another believer. He sent out requests for proposal on a VPN consisting of 16 remote sites connected via T1s, and "Savvis' bid was 10 times cheaper than the one from MCI," he says— $300,000 vs. $3 million. These ISPs have also picked up some vocal critics, many of whom wonder about the viability of providers that don't possess their own backbones. "As an ISP, if you don't own your underlying infrastrcture, you won't be around long," says Joel Maloff, president of the Maloff Consultancy (Dexter, Mich.). Or as John Moshier, group manager for IP services at Sprint, puts it: "The guy driving the bus is the guy in control." " I would extend the backbones to include not only the communications backbone infrastructure but the media STORAGE infrastructure as well. This may be how Ampex will fit into a component "supply chain" delivery of a competitively advantaged product. Solve the communication infrastructure problem then the bottleneck becomes bandwith, solve the bandwith problem, then the bottleneck becomes storage and caching. Ed Perry will look further