Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Ascend stock
At 06:22 PM 11/6/97 -0800, MegaZone wrote:
>I'm talking for myself here - not as a rep for Livingston.
>
>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.
Sounds reasonable, but it just isn't true. Ascend acquired the GRF team and
the switching team and others. These units were doing fine on their own and
they continue to do so. All Ascend added was a worldwide sales team.
>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.
I suppose it's typical to find the one feature that you do well and we
don't do so well and trumpet that. You'll notice that we don't try that
with the numerous features that don't work well on the Portmasters or don't
exist. Let's let the customers tell us what works and what doesn't.
>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.
The TNT architecure has huge growth potential. Our many worldwide carrier
customers would never have bought a deadend product. Telco engineers only
buy serious carrier class equipment. That's part of the reason I've never
seen any Livingston equipment in any Telco operation. There may be some out
there somewhere, but I visit telcos around the world and all I see are
Ascend, Cisco and Nortel/Shiva. That may or may not change with Lucent.
We'll see.
The TNT is a first generation product and it's growing day by day. A year
from now it will be far more advanced, but there will always be more to do.
>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.
We are certainly a bit guilty of offering too much at times. It stems from
customer demand, but some customers are understandably overwhelmed. That's
a challenge for us to improve.
>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.
If you take the long view, it amazing how far Ascend has come. Just a
couple of years ago they had less than 300 employees. Up til the merger
with Cascade, Ascend was bringing in $1,000,000 per employee. That's
slightly lower now as we go through the merger and the continuing growth
process.
Anyone who has worked at a company that has gone through the huge growth
phase that we have understands that there are plenty of ups and downs. But
we are still growing, not shrinking!
>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.
I can understand your thinking if you were still a small company. But the
reality today is that customers want total solutions. Don't you work for
Lucent now? Don't they have end-to-end solutions? Doesn't Cisco too? That's
the way of the world now. Ascend wouldn't have survived as simply an access
concentrator company and neither would Livingston.
Matt Holdrege http://www.ascend.com matt@ascend.com
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