Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : CrossKeys Systems Corp [CKEY and CKY/TSE] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joseph McKeown who wrote (436)	3/1/1999 9:42:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 792

1. The management knew there was trouble lingering and they put together 900k shares as a Christmas present and got out. In this game I suppose that is to be expected. Increasing the float sounds like rationalization. That wasn't the case at all. Early investors,including some non-management employees, had their shares locked up for a year and when the time expired, the company had the choice of putting together a block for an institutional investor(s)or watch the stock tank in a market with no liquidity whatsoever. They did the former. As for knowing there was trouble lingering, again, they didn't know until January that Siemens had pushed forward their exit timing. This due to new management. [Siemens is undergoing massive restructuring.] The timing of CKEYF's announcement is precautionary as the business will wind down over the next two quarters and they didn't want anyone to be surprised when the shortfall actually materializes. I'll defer the technology question to someone else. Regards, Pat

To: Joseph McKeown who wrote (436)	3/2/1999 7:35:00 PM
From: Charles Zapata	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 792

>More importantly, besides the short term financial comings and oings, does the company have key technology that cannot be easily emulated by a competitor or a knowledgeable customer? If the answer is yes I am willing to stay in. Is there an expert out there who can make an honest assessment? Crosskeys has two lines of business: SLA products and custom NMS solutions. The SLA productline (Resolve) provides Service Level Agreements for Telcos and other Telecom/Datacom providers. It is one of the earliest in the market and it is full featured. Resolve is well position to compete against Concorde and a few others. The market for SLAs is poised to pick up as it is becoming a standard way to do business. Its main drawback is the high price. The other line of business is custom solutions for network management. They have done a number of multi-vendor projects and have a good experience in this field. There biggest project is with Siemens. There are two things to watch: 1 - Most important: Resolve share of the SLA market vs market size 2 - Will Newbridge be sold? The second one is less important in potential. Who ever buys Newbridge will be to integrate the two lines of products into one management system. If they chose to use Newbridge 46020 NMS, Crosskeys are the experts. If they chose their NMS, Crosskeys services might be required or not depending on the resources available. If they keep both systems, Crosskeys might be used in various interworking projects. They will likely do this in the short term. Note that the 46020 is a strong market differentiator for Newbridge. Note also that an ATM vendor, FORE, just acquired Euristix, a competitor of Crosskeys. If Lucent buys Newbridge, will they keep using Euristix for multi-vendor management contracts?