re: 3Com to Buy Force10, Riverstone?Why don't you consider putting your IRA into RSTN stock. Face it their employees are only there to pick up a pay check. There is no company loyalty. Their sales guys are all junior mostly from the small var sales group or xerox copy guys. Their engineers have more resumes on the street than any tech company out there, except for maybe entersys.
Bottom line is they will never shake the CTRON image and the Enterprise customers will never trust them. They must always buy the business and that means no margins, no profits and ultimately no business. They better hope that 3com buys them so they can stick around a little while longer
re: 3Com to Buy Force10, Riverstone?3Com in the switching business, out of the business make up your mind... If you are smart you will stay on the low end... Foundry is the way to go there... They are doing very well in SMB accounts... but you are too dumb to buy them...oh well
Juniper.. Scott Kriens big ego is keeping him out of the enterprise market and good I am enjoying their suffering while the carriers chop capex to nothing.. If they had any brains they would have bought extreme 3 years ago and took Cisco head on when the bd was faster than the 6500.. Nope too stupid bought unisphere and will now suffer to integrate code and create some management for their products.
Extreme just plain sucks... product has gone no where in the past two years and anyone who was any good already left.
Enterasys will die a slow and painful death..
RSTN will always have their little niche but nothing more..
Force 10.. cool idea but no market for this in the enterprise... why? Speed is not as important as a very very robust feature set, security, voice, multicast etc... This is why cisco wins not neccessarily the fastest but definitely the most robust...
what happened to Procket??? 280Million in funding and no product yet?? Those VCs must be pissed!!!!
re: 3Com to Buy Force10, Riverstone?I've heard from very reliable sources that the company 3Com is actually looking at is Enterasys - no product overlap and complementary channel strategy. Enterasys is selling loads of Intrusion Detection Systems and throwing in switching and routing gear on the side. To me, this sounds like the most plausible rumor...
re: 3Com to Buy Force10, Riverstone?DCT, yeah, back on the stump for my favorite startup. How are you? Give me a call sometime soon. BTW you guys still suck.
Rodriguez, Riverstone was Yago about 5 years ago, so the system was designed in about 1997. The problem with Riverstone is you're just not a new architecture that solves problems others can't. Riverstoe's claim to fame are services at layers 4-7 for metro service providers. Not one major enterprise that knows what it's doing in networking is going to make an architectural move on Riverstone. They have a nice balance sheet relative to their stock price and that is it. Anyway. 3Com's idiot management team (what's left of it) is probably clueless enough to do this deal or the Enterasys deal. But let them do it. Just as long as they don't buy and then ruin Force10.
re: 3Com to Buy Force10, Riverstone?A good read and prompted me to my first outing on LR - but I've had years of fun and torture at most of Cisco's competitors and it's sad they are mostly incapable long-term.
3Com had the best chance in the latter part of the nineties - even though Cisco bought (not built) their market share. A shame the board of 3Com at the time went buying companies who were flaky or going downhill (Chipcom, Nicecom etc. and the final nail USR).
Foundry are the sensible acquisition but are probably only available at a premium. They are starting to win big deals off the dark lord (csco).
Force10 will be over-valued, and they should be focussing on high-density GigE not a few sales of 10Gig.
Whoever 3Com decide, if EB gets to meddle they are doomed.
I agree RSTN and EXTR are yesterday's news, their technology has been overtaken even by CSCO
re: 3Com to Buy Force10, Riverstone?Good post, langooru (what is that?). Agree with all your points but will say again, Foundry isn't for sale. I'm a convert to Foundry fanhood. They are kicking ass right now. No way they sell out now. They'll be doing the buying for the next couple of years. Watch for them to do a deal for a wi-fi startup (my bet is Trapeze or Blackstorm), and maybe try a router company if they want to go back after the service provider business.
They must be building something that Cisco don't have. This is the second major European carrier to select RSTN over CSCO in the last couple of months after Telefonica.
If these discussions are happening then they are now probably dead as the value for one side will have been lost. Either the buyer will see the price go up or the seller will see the offer go down. No-one discusses this kind of thing in public unless they want it to fail.
Force 10, I think, are going to run out of cash as they are going to find themselves up against 4 or 5 new 10Gig competitors by the end of the year. This will mean that they will have to slash margins. Insiders tell me that the component cost of the F10 switch is very high, not leaving much room for margin. They need the buying power of a larger organisation to reduce manufacturing costs. RSTN don't seem to be an enterprise fit (neither do F10) so I don't see any substance in it.
One thing that I thought was always amusing was that if you print the old 3Com blue logo on a white background it spelled "3Con". Just about says it all for me.
Bottom line is they will never shake the CTRON image and the Enterprise customers will never trust them. They must always buy the business and that means no margins, no profits and ultimately no business. They better hope that 3com buys them so they can stick around a little while longer