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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MMW who wrote (20900)	1/18/1999 1:18:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 77397

Mike, thanks for the reply. >ASND and LU do not have Layer three routers to form IP network.< I wouldn't go that far. ASND has more of a leg up in IP handling and management than you give them credit for. Albeit, their principal and underlying infrastructure is ATM-based, which is what you were probably implying. Some of the largest VoIP deals, if not the largest ones to date, have gone to their multi-voice platform. But this is only a minor part of the whole, and at best a digression to my central thesis. But I felt that it had to be stated, since it is germane to the new territory where both camps aspire, that of multiservices and convergence. Notwithstanding, I'll state once again that CSCO is king in the IP realm, and they need to come up to the seemingly legacious demands that are necessary in order to displace the embedded (but also evolving) architectures where LU is king. And in the process, both sides, representatively, will realize new requirements and push for new standards, which will form the common ground of their combined directions, if they are to be interoperable. The primary distinguishable differences will be in their proprietary adaptations of those standards, beyond the least common denominators. And in order to do that, they must make many radical adjustments to their framework, migrating from a best effort model to one that is more quality oriented, while taking their lead at times from the model they wish to displace. To keep this balanced, CSCO was among the early leaders in this respect, back in '97, when, with IP in their back pocket, they announced their SS7 platform intentions. And before that, when they began work on ATM-like QoS and CoS initiatives. With regard to the renewed emphasis on SS7, however, it now almost seems that prescience was involved in ASND's takeout of Stratus. Another digression. The remainder of your post focuses on the tasks ahead for LU/ASND in its struggle to come up to CSCO's standards in IP, but it ignores the road that CSCO must endure to gain entry into the lucrative carrier and the largest of enterprise voice-data markets, although the latter may be less of a burden to them. Your message therefore does not directly follow or respond to the theme of my initial message. We're not in major disagreement here, rather we differ in the manner in which we present the broader aspects of the situation from both sides. Lest we forget, these companies are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only contenders in the WAN and end-user convergence spaces. I'd watch Nortel's new unified networking framework for both its technical and marketing strengths, as well as a half dozen others, especially those with broadband and terabit routing slants, both domestic and international, who are coming around to the new world's expectations. And who knows? There may be some startup out there at this very early convergence juncture, who, like CSCO of fourteen years ago, will stand up and be noticed, and embark on a new way of hauling bits. Regards, Frank Coluccio