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To: Peppe who wrote (18990)	11/6/1998 9:10:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

Peppe, You brought up two points in your previous posting to me that I quickly wanted to address... You compared NDS to Streetalk. Not a good comparison at all. If you want to compare streetalk to NDS then you must also compare the marketshare of Banyan Vines to NetWare. Vines never attained a marketshare greater than 7%. NetWare, in its prime attained 70+%. NetWare still holds an approx. 50% marketshare (even though it might still be bleeding off a bit). Therefor, although at its time Streetalk was the best (and basically only) Directory Service of its time, Banyan did not have the marketshare to get Streetalk to critical mass acceptance. Therefor, Directory Services 10 years ago was ahead of its time. NDS has now developed and maintains the most extensible and robust DS in the industry. They still have a huge marketshare to get NDS to reach critical mass acceptance (currently 40million licensed users on approximately 2 million servers). They have very successfully gone after and acquired industry acceptance from 90% of the Unix platform vendors, the mainframe vendors (IBM's MVS, Hitachi), Application OEMs like peoplesoft and GreatPlainsSoftware, Lucent on the switching, the Telcos for global directory services (like AT&T and several european Telcos), etc. etc. etc. So what I am trying to say is the you cannot compare NDS to Streetalk. Two completely different beasts in two completely different stages of IT evolution. As for me placing far too much importance in the role of a Directory Service on the sales and fortunes of companies like Cisco or Lucent, I think you are think too short term. The Directory Services technology is just entering its era of HUGE acceptance. I predict that DS will be the buzzword of the year 2000 and beyond (similar to how the term Client/Server was the buzzword in the early ninties). The popularity of DS is building and Novell can thank MSFT for helping the push to make DS reach this mass appeal level (although MSFT's technology will fall on its face). Once the large shops entrench and begin to set policies based around their DS, then companies like Cisco WILL LOSE revenue in these accounts. Dont make any mistakes about it. Example for you, Ford uses NDS. Ford is likely going to further expand the penetration of its NDS into all areas of its IT in order to reduce TCO. They will (if they haven't already) begin making purchasing decisions with a criteria item that says "IT product must be NDS aware". So when it comes time for Ford to replace their aging/outdated switching technology they will look at Cisco and look at Lucent and say, "since I dont plan on replacing my NDS to satisfy my move to a Cisco technology, I will select Lucent switches because they will tie directly into my NDS Tree". Cisco has lost a sale. Thos that think the Directory Services is not important and will play a minor role in a company's buying decisions, are fooling themselves. Within 12-24 months, Directory Services will become a mainstream "musthave" and all IT technologies will have to plug into the big players or risk losing sales to the accounts that made commitments to these DS main players. So, Peppe, I will conclude by saying, I think you are not placing enough importance on how this will affect Cisco's fortunes in the long term! Cheers, Toy