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

To: nord who wrote (9238)	1/31/1999 1:27:00 PM
From: zbyslaw owczarczyk	Respond to of 18016

Sunday, Jan 31 1999 12:37AM ET Reply # of 27324 The Billion-dollar market High-end enterprise/ISP LAN switching products (A view from 10-feet) Cisco Catalyst 6000/6500 150Mpps performance is a fiction created by Cisco Math and Marketing. It is just a promise for the potential performance. In its February release, it can not perform local switching (what? This is 1999), nor can it do routing switch. From product price/performance/features, February's product labeled as “Layer 2/Layer 3, high-density, multilayer switch for voice, video and data” is just a joke, a marketing coup (ComNet trade show announcement) from Cisco. Separate networks for voice, data, and video still predominate. Voice over IP will have no meaningful impact on this product revenue for the next two years. It is more of a mind-game. Cisco Cat 6000 series is focusing on highest port density, not performance (at least not yet), which is absolutely the right focus for large ISP or infrastructure building ISP. Catalyst 6000 initial focus is not the best of breed, but to be good enough to fend off the competitors. Strong marketing, sales and account control. Cisco account control is absolutely the most aggressive add the best in this industry, with John Chamber leading the way. Williams wanted to give a Milpitas based start-up $100M contract, Cisco politics came in, Williams executives cut the order to 10M. Qwest bought couple Gig products from a Sunnyvale startup. When Cisco learnt it, it indirectly forced Qwest to change the PO to demo PO, and one Qwest engineer was fired for buying non-Cisco product. Contrary to the fiction, Cisco support is bad. Unless you are big account or magazine tester, you simply can not get enough Cisco attentions. Cisco is growing too fast. COMS CB9000 3Com has the right vision to start the project early. But the development pace is as fast as Tortoise. The good thing is 3COM has a good product to sell today. The bad thing is 3Com could have much bigger market if it can deliver as it promised. It still has no routing (depends on CB3500 external device to perform one-armed routing), no high-density 10/100/1000 ports. Excellent hardware architecture, this plays into strong strength – manufacture that is the best in the networking industry. Very good price/performance and reliability. RMON2 plays into university market. The device resilience is good. But 3Com has put too much focus on this. It should focus on ‘system' resilience, such as VRRP. It should focus on features and port density. Great channel to penetrate corporate market. It should put more focus on Internet ISP market that is the fasting growing segment in the industry (this is where Cisco is smart). One good trend for COMS and others – most engineers or network administrators do not like Cisco products, but management is another story. CB9000 could be very success in 2000 due to tie to MSFT Win2000 with Active Directory and Policy Manager. Too much focus on graphical network management, no enough on console command line. Too bad, 90% network administrators want and use command lines. Most of them are used to Cisco's commands and debugging ability. CS SmartSwitch Overall an excellent products. But CS needs to improve its financial fortune soon. Can SmartSwitch alone save CS? Sales transitions from direct to channel. Needs to resolve channel versus direct. Good real-life performance device. Not as good in terms of raw throughput as Extreme or Foundry. Gig density is not as good as some startup or Cisco promised future products. Flexible LAN/WAN combinations. Price is very reasonable, but not as good as in all Ethernet configurations. Bay Accelar A sad story for Bay. RapidCity has done nothing big since Bay's acquisition. Bay seems to always acquire the wrong company. David House has too big an ego; it should acquire Extreme or Foundry for better products and better team. Extreme Summit and BlackDiamond Rumor to go IPO between March and May. Impressively building a Channel from Scratch. Good OEM relationship, CPQ has moved a lot of gears for Extreme. Great marketing. The best in the Gig-startup. Its advertisement is much more impressive than Foundry's dark, dimmed advertisement. As I last count for the last 4-month, Extreme has the highest exposures in the NET magazines; it shows more than twice than the other startup. Array of products from stackable to Chassis. It has cost effective layer 2 products. Take advantage of using the same ASIC on all products to lower the ASIC prices (great thinking behind it). Great performance. Can not complain too much. Excellent 10/100 density and good Gig port density. Immature routing software. Few big routing users. Needs to improve layer 3 software quality and features. Not yet in the same class as Foundry or Cisco's routing software. Needs to invest more wisely in software resources. Enterprise management is the wrong thing to invest for startup. Foundry Iron products Rumor to go IPO between June and August. Direct sales. It is against general rules of layer 2 switches needs to sell through channel. Its sales team is very strong in US. Many large ISPs and Fortune 1000 accounts are in Foundry accounts. The only Gig, layer 3 start-up that takes sales away from Cisco (Extreme probably takes more away from Bay and 3Com) Chassis-based product has excellent architecture. 10/100 port density is good. Needs to come out higher density within 9 month, with its small footprint, this will be a challenge. Gig density is excellent. Excellent software features from a small team (I heard the number is 10, Extreme has close to 30). The only company in the industry that has switch, routing, server load balancing and cache redirect in the same hardware platform. It is very wisely using layer 3 and layer 4 software to move layer 2 switch products, to protect the price erosion of layer 2 product. Weak marketing. The head of marketing is the worst PR for this company; she definitely did not know their products very well (from my experience in Europe). One magazine editor ridicules Foundry product manager is really a high-end secretary to me. But since Foundry is direct sale, marketing probably won't matter. Next Previous \| Previous \| Next \| Respond \|