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(ASCEND) Ascend picks themselves up and brush off... (fwd)
FYI
Found this on C-Nets site about the woes at Ascend and the idea of
how they plan to regain control and confidence on the inter/intranet
market.
-Jason
Ascend Communications (ASND) hopes a new strategy
incorporating technology acquired this summer will lift it out
of its financial doldrums.
The company next week will launch a new addition to an
existing box that will allow for the simultaneous support of
Frame Relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and
Ethernet-based Internet protocol (IP) schemes. Ascend
acquired the technology through its $3.7 billion acquisition of
Cascade Communications in May.
Ascend also will roll out a new piece of networking hardware
for layouts based on ATM that offers higher speeds for data
flows.
The moves offer the first concrete evidence of how the
company plans to both incorporate technology derived from
the Cascade acquisition and roll it into an overarching
strategy targeting enterprise wide-area backbone networks,
which are the interconnection points of the Internet and
carrier networks.
It may come at a good time for the company, due to the recent
announcement of reduced expectations for its fiscal third
quarter. The company said in a pre-announcement that
earnings would fall about 33 percent for the quarter, which
ended September 30.
Ascend is coping with an increasingly crowded field in its
core remote-access hardware business, which may be taking
a bite out of revenue as it incorporates Cascade into its
operations, according to industry observers.
Ascend officials said the new Cascade gear will help service
providers as businesses turn to the public network to fulfill
their wide-area connection needs, since implementing private
wide-area links between sites can be financially prohibitive.
To augment an existing CBX 500 box, the company will
introduce capabilities that allow support for frame-based
packets in the form of new modules that fit into the chassis
that support Frame Relay and Ethernet-based IP layouts. The
new support for frame-based data networks is intended to
allow service providers to augment current offerings for
customers without having to add a new infrastructure to
support it.
Multiservice support for the CBX 500 is due in the first
quarter of next year, with prices per port coming in at $10,000
for the six-port Frame Relay module and $12,500 for the
four-port Ethernet-based module.
The new switch, called the GX 550, transports data at OC-48
rates, the latest and fastest speed level for gear of this type.
Ascend officials claim they are the first to offer this speed in
ATM-based gear.
The new gear, which will ship in the first quarter of next year,
will cost $110,000 for a box configured for 25-gbps (gigabits
per second) speeds. Cards that fit into the GX 550 chassis
are the same type, no matter what speed a network
administrator desires, making it easy to incorporate a variety
of links within one box.
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