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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (8920)	1/9/1999 2:30:00 PM
From: zbyslaw owczarczyk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18016

Inside France: newbridge.com You talked a little bit about leased lines, VPNs and frame relay. What services are the most popular? Which do best in the French market? Leased lines are still important. For example, Cegetel is probably going to invest in a major ATM network in the near future. But leased lines will still be a major component for Cegetel. They want to deploy leased lines to compete with France Telecom. And they're going to deploy ATM and put circuit emulation on top of ATM to deploy leased line services. The second one is frame relay right now. Frame relay is an easy way to provide leased line services for LAN interconnection, typically where you can put a router at the periphery. But suddenly people are realizing that frame relay is not good enough. What the enterprises are looking for is complete managed services, not just leased lines enhanced by the fact that they're packets oriented à la frame relay. They're really looking for managed services. So the new generation of services is definitely going to be managed services. VPN-based -- probably IP VPN-based as well -- will be the big-time market opportunity. And this is where Newbridge is very well focused right now, with our switched routing solutions. Of course after the managed services we'll see a new generation of e-commerce and networking economy. But at this stage I will say managed services are the most important focus, and is where everybody in the carrier space wants to invest. What is the legacy of X.25 in France? X.25 is huge here. France's Transpac network is the world's largest X.25 network. Transpac is making a lot of money out of this business. It will be in place for a long time. I have customers for example like Crédit Lyonnais, which is one of France's largest banks. They have an X.25 network and have just announced that they are going to keep X.25 for a minimum of three to five years. They cannot suddenly replace X.25 with an IP-based network just because it's IP. All the peripheral equipment, the customer premise equipment, is X.25 and is operating reasonably well. This is where, again, Newbridge is very strong. We can support X.25 with our products, much better than any other company. We are currently in discussions with a major enterprise customer that has about 2,000 X.25 switches from the former OST, a company we bought here. They want to migrate these X.25 switches to frame relay, ATM services and IP. This multiservice approach is exactly what we're offering.