re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchThe management of Ascend Communications laughed when they sold Ascend to Lucent. Lucend did make a penny on Ascend products. Some of the guys from Ascend are still around and doing the same thing.
I think the guy from Lucent who recommended acquitions of Ascend should be fired if he has not already left the company.
The guys at Lucent are not reading the comments. I think they learn a lot.
re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchWaiting for a green card in this environment is very risky. Perhaps LU may be thinking of moving product and people to India as the people may be going anyhow.
re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchRE: (To the poster who said that the router crashes after 56 seconds, it has improved somewhat, they even have static routing working now!!!)
Well, I had some exposure to the NX64000 in February/March 2000. I seem to remember that the box could run OSPF and ISIS (?). However, it could not handle equal cost multipath topologies in OSPF. Other then that it seemed to be a very promising product (I loved the IOS-cloned CLI :).
My 2c: LU was bad for most/all of its aquisitions, most notably INS (Well, that might be a bit biased :).
re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchTo all of the NX supporters:
You are so right about the NX box (now code named Xorul) - it's a great platform, the engineers currently working on it are top notch, industry veterans and Nortel should be running scared.
You ought to make sure LU continues to pump millions, no, make that billions of dollars into the project because it IS the next generation core ATM/IP/MPLS switch/router.
The NX box is the best thing out there and has a chance of gaining 100% of the market share. And Lu continues to attract the absolute best mgt and architects and engineers from both the east and west coast onto the project.
I hear some of the best and brightest people from CSCO and JNPR have been interviewing with LU just so they can get a chance to be part of this history making dream team working on the NX box.
I can't wait, for these are exciting times for LU. Ride on LU! Ride on!
re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchI wonder on what your claim regarding stability of NX box is based. And I think that Nortel worries a lot that it has nothing that compares to NX. They couldn't even make a decent OC48 IP router not talking about quad OC48 or OC192c. So check your sources!
re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchAnd I think that Nortel worries a lot that it has nothing that compares to NX.
They have Juniper... :)
I hear some of the best and brightest people from CSCO and JNPR have been interviewing with LU just so they can get a chance to be part of this history making dream team working on the NX box.
re: Lucent Bags High-End Switch"The management of Ascend Communications laughed when they sold Ascend to Lucent."
Yea! The laughed all the way to the bank and then started Zhone with $500 million in VC paper. Those of us who worked at Ascend cried for a week and were told by our new bosses to find other employment. Maybe that's why if didn't work!
re: Lucent Bags High-End Switch""The management of Ascend Communications laughed when they sold Ascend to Lucent."
Yea! The laughed all the way to the bank and then started Zhone with $500 million in VC paper. Those of us who worked at Ascend cried for a week and were told by our new bosses to find other employment. Maybe that's why if didn't work! "
It's all part of an interesting history now. Someone mentioned in a previous post that the person who decided to buy Ascend should be fired. Indeed, the poor guy was fired by the board last October. Read between lines from several interviews with Bill O'Shea, then the head of data networking at Lucent, O'Shea was actually not in favor of purchasing Ascend. After the Ascend acquisition, O'Shea was moved to enterprise and data networking went to Dan Stanzione. O'Shea was not present at the Lucent Headquater meeting site for the "perfect fit" party. After Schacht took over, O'Shea comes back to center stage.
Mory as a shrewd business man was trying to knit an empire. At the time he acquired Stratus, he was rumored to have targeted an optical company as well but was rejected (he must have lowballed too much). If the bid was successful, Ascend could have gone it's own way. Mory acknowleged he couldn't get all the pieces he wanted to compete with the big boys when he rationalized the selling to Lucent.
So a bruised ego and large chunks of change made Ascend a trophy wife for Lucent for a few glorious moments. (At least, I heard reports of John Roth lamenting he got Bay because Ascend was not for sell).
re: Lucent Bags High-End SwitchI'll tell ya, if Axiowave came a knockin', I'd be a rockin' right on down there. But what do you think they would hire me to work on? Perhaps a core Ip/ATM/MPLS/x.25/Frame Relay/PPP/Sonet/metro-ethernet/optical/long haul/kitchen blender/ospf/routing/switchable/diaper-changer?
I think the guy from Lucent who recommended acquitions of Ascend should be fired if he has not already left the company.
The guys at Lucent are not reading the comments. I think they learn a lot.