re: Alcatel & TiMetra Seal the DealI know what Cisco had to do to win that business which is reason number 859 million for me to hate Cisco. You know what they gave away, too, fm. They didn't win that business, they bought it. Now I know why Timetra lost the biz. Oh well, Alcatel can take Timetra a lot of places, including wireless.
Watch for SBC to announce a major reseller agreement for l-3 switching with another vendor to hold Cisco's feet to the fire and get them to drop prices. Should be fun times ahead!
re: Alcatel & TiMetra Seal the DealWile, No argument...but with regards to SBC. Saw their product in the lab for EON, but Cisco won the award (by beating out Rstone). So where does that leave ALA and Timetra? fm
re: Alcatel & TiMetra Seal the Deal>1) Does the TiMetra buyout valuation change if >Alcatel (ALA) stock keeps going down ?
It goes down with Alcatel, which is where it belongs.
>2) In light of this acq, do you think Procket >is indeed worth more than $800Million, >and the buyer will be Alcatel ?
$800Million, hahahahaha, that is too funny, I said the bubble was back, but I didnt say it was bigger than before. Alcatel wont have anything to do with them because they are 99% hype. Alcatel will only buy companies that are 100-150% hype.
re: Alcatel & TiMetra Seal the Deal Say what you like, but my understanding of this deal and my experience (call me a cynic if you like) makes me think that this is bum deal for Alcatel, and I still see many inherent risks..
The risks as I see them...
1) TiMetra is a risky proposition because (By their own admission in the statement made regarding the deal) TiMetra only have prototypes today, there must therfore be a real risk that the product may not in fact ever work properly or be deployable. I’ve seen this many times in the past, generally the company selling itself makes wild claims about fantastic new breakthrough hardware/price/performance/scalability, what they generally fail to point out is that massive software development and debugging and testing is still required before the box can actually be deployed in any real world IP network. I think it is the claims made about their network processor array approach and their exec background in hardware that sets my alarm bells ringing here. They may well have a neat hardware design, but there is a lot more to penetrating the carrier IP space than that.
2)Risky technology bet. TiMetra have pretty much hung their hat on VPLS, and yet it is not at all clear if VPLS will indeed become a useful technology in the carrier space, as Martini points out in his article on the LR site. I would say that he is not alone, most carriers who know what they are doing have concerns about VPLS and historically bridging type models such as VPLS and ATM LANE have suffered from scaling issues and management issues. I would say that the SP jury is out on this right now.
3) Risk missing an opportunity. Since Alcatel has such a strong position in the xDSL market, why would they not seek to acquire an edge routing company with BRAS, the fact that they have not done this surely must mean that they now risk missing an opportunity to exploit and expand their position in this important and fast growing market. Perhaps TiMetra will claim that they can buy this code in and add BRAS, and if that is the case, then again this is classic sales type BS experience shows that software development is never this easy in practice.
4) Risk that this does not deliver the IP goods “Alcatel Strengthens IP Portfolio with acquisition of TiMetra” perhaps this would better read, Alcatel starts IP Portfolio with the Acquisition of TiMetra. Anyone like to comment on TiMetra’s IP experience or their engineers track record? I seem to remember an article on LightReading back on June 14th 2002 where Alwan admits that they got their routing code from 3rd parties (see below). It’s this and their general background in hardware development and Enterprise layer 2/3 switches that makes me think that there must be a huge question mark hanging over their ability to build good IP routing code, I mean code good enough to satisfy large carriers.
And finally, if TiMetra are buying in their IP routing code then again I'm not sure how exactly this helps Alcatel strengthen their IP portfolio. By my reckoning they need all the IP software help they can get, can TiMetra deliver?
I guess only time will tell?
From LR June 14th 2002. http://www.lightreading.com/do... While Timetra may have a lot of expertise in network processor technology, it seems to be lacking in routing software expertise. In fact, six of its eight top executives worked in the enterprise switch division of Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT - message board) before coming to Timetra. Three of them, including Alwan, had been with Rapid City Communications, a Layer 3 Gigabit Ethernet switch startup that was bought by Bay Networks in 1997 (Nortel bought Bay Networks in 1998). None of them seems to have much experience with routing targeted at service providers. Alwan says Timetra has built its BGP (border-gateway protocol) code from scratch and gotten other routing protocols off the shelf from third-party providers.
Perhaps you are right about the listing being there a while. Home grown NMS sounds like a quick-to-market idea, but all telecom/datacom uses SNMP, and maybe TL1 (Ciena). Adding snmp after the fact (or other style proxy agent) is a contractor's dream.
re: Alcatel & TiMetra Seal the DealInstead of entering new markets Alcatel should watch out its competitors and concentrate in what it does best. At a time when the optical networking market seems to be picking up Alcatel looks like losing market share there. Not a single contract announced there for a long time at a time when competitors are are getting everything that's up for grabs.
re: Alcatel & TiMetra Seal the DealWhy should home grown NMS be a quick-to-market solution? What makes 3d party NMSs any better? In my 10-years in network management I haven't yet seen a network management package that is truly worth it. Most allow you to do very simplistic things. Most tools (all that I have encountered) are cumbersome and, in my opinion, attempt to solve all the wrong problems.. And then there are companies that claim that they can build it for you.. Have you seen their products? Rip-off is the word that comes to mind.
Another question is why should home grown NMS solution exclude SNMP? It would be just safe to assume that their box would have SNMP to the box and that their NMS would talk to the box through either SNMP or CLI or combination of both. Unless they are completely insane, they would do it this way. However, if you look at Juniper, they managed to pull it off with their XML, CLI and read-only MIBs just fine. Even if, like Juniper, they have XML interface at the box level, if it's half decently designed, it would be a matter of writing a mediation layer.. Yes, it is a contractor's dream, but it's not that difficult to do, of course, if you stay away from hiring contractors, in which case it would become money pit.
Watch for SBC to announce a major reseller agreement for l-3 switching with another vendor to hold Cisco's feet to the fire and get them to drop prices. Should be fun times ahead!