Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Ascend stock (fwd)
I'm talking for myself here - not as a rep for Livingston.
Once upon a time Jason Nealis shaped the electrons to say...
> And this just isn't isolated to 1800's, try 4004's, TNT's. Whenever
>a OS release hits the FTP server, Many people are scared to run it, Most
>people are forced in running it to fix other problems, But by doing
>that they introduce new problems into their network.
>
>Anyone Agree??
I pulled an all nighter last night and happened to be home with the TV on
when the financial news came on. They had a small report on Ascend.
They said Ascend announced very low groth predictions for the next year,
single digit growth. Possibly reaching double digit growth in Q498 - but
that was optimistic.
A very different story than we've heard in the past - where the sky was
the limit.
My personal opinion - Ascend used to do a fair job at what they did. But
in the past year or two they have overreached. Grabing for the switch
market, megapops, xdsl, ATM, home, etc. Now they do a LOT - but they don't
do much of it very well. If they focused the engineering effort they used
on the GRF on getting the 4000 family whipped into shape it'd probably be
a lot more robust, or the TNT. Ascend has built a policy of being one of
the first to announce their support for new technologies, and then they
rush to be first to market if at all possible. K56flex in January 1997?
Remember that claim? Instead of building a strong foundation and then
taking the next logical step, they've adopted "shotgun marketing". Fire
enough products and you'll find a buyer somewhere.
I'm not ragging on them - this is what I see. They are still serious
competition, but we pick the fights. Let them have the switch market,
at least for now. We'll fight the 4000s and TNTs on (ISP) features,
performance, reliability, density, etc. And we've been winning a lot of
deals from traditional Ascend customers. Why? OSPF works - and worked
from day one. Performance is higher - we had the NSTL test them out.
Reliability, in general, has been better. They run a great deal cooler.
The ability to do DOSBS and modems on chant1 has been a selling point.
We don't have the laundry list Ascend has - but we have the features the
majority of the market is asking for. And more about to appear - WAN cards,
ethernet multihoming, BACP, OSPF on demand links, etc. Looking at the
feature list of today's MAX, there are not many popular things the PM-3,
and other products, do not do that it does. And there are things that
it doesn't do that you can find elsewhere. And the features it has that
set it apart are shrinking in number almost monthly. For a very long
time the MAX was the only game in town with no serious competition. So
naturally it became dominant. But capabilities are converging, and
there isn't a lot of headway to be made in a feature race these days.
No one seems to take the lead for very long with the rapid changes.
The TNT's architecture doesn't have growth potential. And I know some
Ascend folks who'll admit, if not in public. It was early - but pays the
price for that. Others can learn from it, and technology moves on. Units
with the same features only much higher densities are in the pipes. And
some of the TNT features still have not been realized in production level
code.
Having many different product lines with different ancestries also means
different code bases. It isn't a homogeneous product line. What works
on one may not work on another, features are not common across units, etc.
All of this leads to buyer confusion, and frankly makes it easier to sell
against them. Which means a shrinking market. I also think they were
overoptimistic, but a long shot, with thier predictions for this past year.
The stock ballooned on hype - but settled back down to more realistic levels
when real figures, and more realistic projections, started coming out.
Ascend believed their own hype. They were 'the next Cisco' - but Cisco
didn't get to do everything in a year. Ascend's marketing, at least to
an outsider, appears to pull the company in different directions every
couple of months. Losing focus, and becoming a jack of all trades - but
master of none. And increasingly I talk to formerly loyal Ascend customers
who are just fed up. Tired of playing release-of-the-week, waiting for
features that don't work to be fixed, and waiting for new features to be
added.
Does Ascend want to be an access concentrator company? Or a switch
company? Or a SoHo unit company? I don't think they can do it *all*
at once and still produce high quality products across the board, Focus
on one area first, clean it up, and make it work. Then move to the next
area. It may mean holding off on some market segment for a while, but
I think trying to be everything to everyone is a losing proposition.
Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now.
-MZ
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