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

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (23687)	3/15/1999 10:23:00 PM
From: Jeffrey D	Respond to of 77400

Well, at least the 3COM execs were smart enough to see the damage CSCO was doing to them. Too bad they didn't have the time to advise their shareholders in time too. Jeff << 3Com's Benhamou, Others Sell Shares: Insider Focus (Update1) Santa Clara, California, March 5 (Bloomberg) -- 3Com Corp. insiders sold as much as $178 million worth of 3Com stock in the fiscal third quarter, before the No. 2 computer-networking company issued a profit warning that sent its shares tumbling. Chief Executive Eric Benhamou, Chief Financial Officer Christopher Paisley, Senior Vice President Debra Engel and other executives sold at prices near a 52-week high of 51 1/8 reached on Dec. 23, according to the Washington Service, which tracks insider buying and selling. On Feb. 2, 3Com rival Cisco Systems Inc. said its sales made through distributors -- a key 3Com market -- were surging. 3Com shares lost more than a third of their value by Tuesday, when the maker of PalmPilots and other networking gear said its third- quarter profit would fall far short of analysts' forecasts. The insider selling ''doesn't always look good,'' said Eric Efron, portfolio manager of the USAA Aggressive Growth Fund, which owns 350,000 3Com shares. ''It depends on the (company's insider selling) rules and how many (shares) they have left. It's worth looking into.'' 3Com senior vice president and general counsel Mark Michael said all 3Com employees have a limited time after a quarterly earnings report to exercise their stock options. He declined to comment on any of the individual sales. >>

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (23687)	3/16/1999 1:35:00 AM
From: jach	Respond to of 77400

This is pretty bad for CSCO. CSCO losing in the LAN mkt segment also. With all these real competitions, look for CSCO to be down substantailly from these high valuation. Also, currently CSCO has PE of more than 100+, their historical PE is around 60. --------------------------- article from network world Foundry steals Cisco load-balancing customers Complete Foundry switch has an edge over dedicated Cisco box. By ROBIN SCHREIER HOHMAN Network World, 03/15/99 SUNNYVALE, CALIF. - Feisty Foundry Networks is winning over some Cisco server load-balancing customers, replacing the dedicated Cisco box with more general purpose Layer 3 and Layer 4 switches. Based on low prices, shrewd marketing and a versatile product line, Foundry has been convincing some IT managers to replace the aging Cisco Local Director with Foundry's ServerIron 10/100/1000 switch. "It's not that Local Director is an awful product," says Matt Davis, manager of corporate NT operations at Republic Industries. "It's a very basic low-end product without a lot of the functionality you can find on the Foundry products." Davis was using four redundant pairs of Local Directors for nearly a year to distribute traffic on the company's Web sites. That's no small task, because Republic Industries owns National CarRental, Alamo, CarTemps USA and AutoNation, which itself owns hundreds of new car dealerships across the U.S. Hello . . . Cisco? So you would think Cisco would pay attention when Davis put in a trouble ticket, but he says that didn't happen. He says Republic wasn't able to successfully balance more than two or three Web sites, mostly because Local Director forces the creation of virtual LANs for load balancing. "We never got a Cisco engineer out here to address the problem," Davis says, despite opening three trouble tickets with Cisco. "They'd tell us there's something wrong with our NT servers, with our routers." Davis says the problem was that Republic's Web servers are rigged for both the Internet and the internal network, a configuration the Local Directors couldn't handle. So when a friend recommended Foundry, Davis took a look. He wound up replacing the Local Directors with ServerIron switches and plans to put in about 15 of the Foundry boxes by year-end. "We tested with Foundry's switches in the same configuration, and it works like a charm," he says. The same thing happened at New Watch Co., a reseller of watches on the Internet. "A friend of mine who runs an ISP is a big proponent of Cisco," says Jeff Helms, vice president of engineering at New Watch. "He buys all Cisco, and for him to tell me that ServerIron was a better piece of equipment than the Cisco Local Director meant something." Helms ultimately replaced two Local Directors with two ServerIron switches to distribute traffic in front of a server farm comprising six Compaq dual-processor 400-MHz rack-mounted servers. The network is all Windows NT with 10/ 100M bit/sec connections. "The Local Director doesn't have as much throughput. It doesn't have near the capabilities for testing whether or not your servers have gone down, or whether they're currently functioning properly," Helms says. "Local Director's kind of gotten long in the tooth, technology-wise," says Dave Passmore, president of consulting firm NetReference. Not only that, the market is changing. "The thought that people need a separate product for that rather than combining [a load balancer] into the switch or the router is not particularly attractive," Passmore says. Meanwhile, Foundry's on the fast track to an initial public offering for this spring, and the company's counting on making more inroads into server load balancing. New Watch's Helms puts it this way: "We've got the Local Directors as paperweights right now, if anybody wants to buy them." ===================== customer said to use as "Paper Weights" !! will you not be curious as to what those thousands of engs are doing in csco when a customer said something like this.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (23687)	3/16/1999 1:47:00 AM
From: jach	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 77400

This is another bad news for CSCO. Had been saying it all along, competitions will hurt the business, revenue will suffer and the stock price will very likely go down substantially. all imo. =============== extract from the article With general availability of its next-generation edge switch delayed, Cisco Systems Inc. is missing out on one of the fastest-growing sectors of the booming Internet service provider arena and at the same time exposing to rivals a vulnerable spot in its product arsenal. Cisco first previewed the ATM-based multiservice edge switch--the MGX 8800--last June and promised to ship the device late last year. But the San Jose, Calif., company has hit a four- to five-month delay in delivering the switch, confirmed Don Listwin, Cisco's senior vice president of product development. The delay comes as established and upstart competitors roll out new next-generation products, each of which could threaten Cisco's ascendancy in IP carrier equipment. At least one such vendor, Juniper Networks Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., appears to be making inroads with its M40 Internet backbone router, which competes with Cisco's 12000 router. "Six months ago, being late wasn't a problem," said Joe Skorupa, an analyst with Ryan Hankin Kent Inc., in San Francisco. Now, "[Cisco] is under assault in every segment of the carrier market because viable competitors are appearing. New edge routers are going after the [Cisco] 7500 replacement; there's strong competition in [digital subscriber line] and very strong competition in ATM [asynchronous transfer mode]. The game has changed on them." This activity hasn't been lost on Cisco, whose 10-Q filing last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission stated that the company faces increased competition from "large telecommunications equipment suppliers and well-funded startup companies." =====================================================