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

To: Glenn Perry who wrote (3774)	11/9/1998 3:52:00 PM
From: Ed Perry	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Although there are some technical problems underlying "the bandwidth problem", it is beginning to appear that it is (or will soon be - within 2 years at most) primarily a regulatory and "standards" problem. You have heard the one about standards: "Standards are a wonderful thing, there are so many to choose from." I think that when an Ed Bramson type refers to "the bandwidth problem", he may really be using a shorthand to describe the sorting out of turf issues between the telco's, the cable companies and perhaps the satellite wireless operators. When these issues finally sort out, there will certainly be surprise winners and losers. Not a good place to be headed for positioning. From the link: "The merger, the companies said in the filing, will add an important new competitor to the ranks of national and global providers that can offer consumers a full bundle of advanced communications services. Today, only a few players are positioned to offer such packages, including AT&T, MCI, WorldCom and Sprint. The merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE will bring a new competitor into that arena with the necessary scale and scope to participate in this emerging market. Ampex's targeting the back-end market, the high requirement corporate / agency user, is a much better play for now. I would throw in the systems integrator emphasis over the web hoster. Unless the web hoster were seen to be only one more service feature (for those organization completely Internet risk averse).See one of my earlier posts on the economics of the business of "Co-Location Hosting." As far as the U of Colorado in Boulder is concerned, (I believe that Ampex is siteing their manufacturing facility there), there have always been cozy associations between business and universities. From student internships to funded research, to professorial consulting clear to joint ventures. Any of these models can be used. What is important is to have a secured site located nearby. Just a note, that as the complexity of storage and caching increases, so must the operating systems and algorithmic methods become more abstract. Here is where university associations become very valuable. Also with regard to the new high-end MicroNet product line to be introduced, it is important to have a continuium of high-end scaleable solutions for large scale storage and retrieval problems. That is, depending on the contex, the solution will proceed from optics to disk to library housed tape. As in the DCR arena, there is no one answer for all circumstances. However, in the storage and caching market in the Internet context, there appears to be a huge and emerging market. Which brings me to my final point. Instead of looking at Ampex as a revenue stream producer, how about viewing it as a new venture. Here the cash on hand becomes working capital and the appropriate measures become more that of "the burn rate" over time relative to the potential market revenue. The street is obviously not evaluating Ampex in this light. This may be a function of lack of announcements from Ampex. Perhaps we will get clarification from the market research of Imagio and follow on going forward. In any event, we are left with speculations as to business developments but we still have price action as a proxy for this news. For the near term, I would take my clues from the market place for AXC shares. That is, if the specialist accumulates, then do the same. If he distributes, and it will be apparent, then get out. Ed Perry