re: Sycamore Slouches After EarningsSo what is this guy doing to justify his pay check every month? They have as much money as Ciena for Christ's sake, and they're not making investments, signing partners, building new products, doing anything at all to re-tool for any kind of recovery. They are in no way competitive as a company and there's no excuse.
Dude, why don't you just retire? I hate seeing guys just coast when there are shareholders and employees counting on him to go to work and figure out how to enrich the shareholders and keep the employees employed.
He may be "sick of Mory" but at least Mory's working to make Zhone count. Sycamore doesn't count right now, balance sheet or no. Pisses me off.
re: Sycamore Slouches After EarningsSCMR has had a relationship in various forms with Siemens for over 3 years......and not a nickel of revenue.
Yet, Siemens was able to secure a top market share position for Unisphere in Europe in a market space where they were basically clueless.
Why then has this relationship resulted in nothing more than additional R&D expense...not even a penny for eval and demo gear...in a space that is Siemens bread and butter.
How the hell can they not have SOMETHING going with DT at the very least. DT would buy a bag of s#%%#%t from Siemens as long as it had the Siemens label on it
Sitting in chelmsford and wondering what went wrong isn't going to get them out of the mess they're in.
If you have no legitimate direct sales force (team pasta doesn't count as legitimate)and your channels can't sell jack......what do you expect to happen...someone show up with a mercy PO cause you're nice folks?
Sell some boxes or sell the company....but someone sell something. Before long the "macroeconomic condition" excuse is going to go away, and SCMR will be exposed for having no addressable market.
Bottom line is they got their asses kicked a long time ago by Ciena and Lu (about the only ass Lu can kick)and the game's over!
Wake up, please and at least go beat up your channel partner for a PO and make it look like you have a chance.
Maybe Araldo can go figure that out while he's on his 3 week vacation.....
re: Sycamore Slouches After EarningsLet's not be too hard on these guys. To this company's credit, they have made some hard decisions the last 2 1/2 years ever since 360 Networks, their bread & butter, led the charge of competitive carriers into bankruptcy. One by one, their other customers fell by the waste side (Storm Communications, Williams, Core Express, etc...). By mid 2001 the tone at this company changed from greenfield carriers armed with Sycamore technology were going to rule the marketplace to we need to focus our marketing efforts on incumbent carriers. The made the tough call to exit the transport business at the risk of pissing off the installed base and focused exclusively on switching. They made substantial progress with their switching line up over the last two years: integrated optics, OSMINE compliance, support for BLSR, integration with Siemens transport, and OIF UNI support (not sure how much of a factor this last one is going to be).
My impression of this company is that it's a good company with best-of-breed products and hard-working (albeit shell-shocked) employees that's just caught between a rock and a hard place. As far as investing in this company, I gave up when the stock rebounded to $3.75 and dumped all my shares (given I had owned these shares since early 2001, you can imagine how much money I lost, but, what the hell, might as well add to that tax loss carryforward). At least this company isn't guilty of the egregious self-dealing and maniupulation shown by management at TELM and CORV.
As far as GIGBE, I would take Dan Smith's comments on the call to mean that SCMR is in the runnnig but we're not counting our chickens before they hatch. I've been interested in an SN 16000 - CoreDirector bake off for some time, so it will be interesting to see who's going to win that portion of the contract and what the criteria for selection ulitimately is going to be.
As far as their cash hoarding, I don't blame them, though it's been speculated on LR that they were bidding for the ATM business of LU but couldn't come to terms on the price. As far as turning down and outright merger with Siemens, who could blame them at the price their stock would have fetched (net of cash) in a deal at that time. It's funny but the bulk of that cash hoard comes from a well-timed secondary offering in 2000 at the hefty price of $150 a share. As for opportunities at DT, I think LU announced that DT was the flagship customer for LambdaUnite when they introduced the product last year. Not sure if Sycamore can get in there as well as the other OEO vendor.
Last fall there was speculation that Telefonica, France Telecomm, and BT were dipping their toes into the optical switching market. The only one that came to fruition was the BT contract that Ciena won. Now I read that Sprint and MCI are looking to migrate their backbones to a mesh topology. I doubt if anything will come of that given the financial position of those two. My feeling is that when the smoke clears, the remaining service providers are going to be looking to partner with vendors with more than just a best-of-breed optical switching portfolio. Who knows?
re: Sycamore Slouches After EarningsInterest and/or capital gains (losses) do not show up on an Income Statement (i.e. they do not count as revenue). They would only show up on a Cash Flow statement and would also be reflected on the Balance Sheet as part of the change in cash, or short and long term investments.
re: Sycamore Slouches After EarningsLR writes - "Smith said that Sycamore built products that were ready to use for any customer, and that it could sell its existing products for any such project."
Reminds me of Bill Murray in Ghostbuster..."No job is too big.... No Fee is too big!!!"
Jeeeeeeeezzzzz - Everytime I think these yamheads are the shallowest butch of doorknobs in the industry Team "A"roldo drains just a little bit more out of the pool...
re: Sycamore Slouches After EarningsAny chance that Sycamore shareholders can recall Dan? I think that Gary Coleman would make a fine CEO for the company. He couldn't do any worse than the current management team (Whatchew you talkin' 'bout, Araldo?)
Dude, why don't you just retire? I hate seeing guys just coast when there are shareholders and employees counting on him to go to work and figure out how to enrich the shareholders and keep the employees employed.
He may be "sick of Mory" but at least Mory's working to make Zhone count. Sycamore doesn't count right now, balance sheet or no. Pisses me off.