re: Was Cerent Worth It?I am not sure where you get your information or ideas...; but I have years of experience at RBOC's including SBC, the PacBell SBC, Ameritec SBC, Nynex Verizon, GTE Verizon, Bell Atlantic Verizon, and US West Qwest, and I can tell you that Cerent Cisco has made insignificant traction inside the RBOC ILEC space. Those accounts are served quite well by various combinations of Fuji, Lucent, Nortel, Tellabs Alcatel for their optical transport and switching needs. Don't let any other stories fool you. this includes next gen SONET gear as well as DWDM, DXC or OXC, from core to edge. Where those big players don't own the RBOC business, you have second Teir players like ECI, Hitachi, NEC, Marconi, Ciena, AFC, owning various niche's within the space.
Cisco is far far behind any of these in transport at edge or core. And the Cerent 454 while a worthy box is still just a SONET box with a little DWDM bolt on shelf they buy turnkey from JDSU or Avanex or others. The DWDM is not even really a part of same shelf.
Cisco Cerent is incredibly vulnerable to the current downturn due to the vast portion of their business being in greenfield carriers, or greenfield sub portions of companies like MCI/Worldcomm or Qwest.
Where you might have heard something like you are describing, is that Cisco has made BIG sales volume strides inside RBOC's, but NOT for deployment of Cisco gear into BOC networks per se. Cisco has done well inside RBOC's selling routers for the RBOC internal LAN/WAN Enterprise to hook up servers and gear to run their internal network management communications infrastructure...not for hauling customer traffic. In this instance the RBOC is just like any other big enterprise customer. And Cisco is strong in the enterprise.
The other big place Cisco has done well is with the outsourcing/ system/ network integration arms of the non-regulated portions of the RBOC's. What many folks don't know is that among the largest systems and network integrators and resellers in the world are the RBOC's!! SBC alone is larger than EDS or Arthur Anderson, and nearly as large as some of the truly big players like IBM in the systems integration business. In this portion of the business, the RBOC designs and builds and sometimes operates large enterprise networks for big end users in their territories. Like state and regional government, large companies, etc. In this capacity, the RBOC's are some of CISCO's very very largest customers and resellers. The RBOC buys Cisco gear use in their enterprise customers campus networks.
This is NOT the same as penetrating the RBOC transport and switching and signalling networks.
re: Was Cerent Worth It?...What many folks don't know is that among the largest systems and network integrators and resellers in the world are the RBOC's!! SBC alone is larger than EDS or Arthur Anderson, and nearly as large as some of the truly big players like IBM in the systems integration business...
Yes, and when an enterprise is too stupid to manage its own network they get taken to the cleaners!
re: Was Cerent Worth It?"...Cisco never mastered the key to selling into RBOC accounts."
Well, you're probably right if you refer to optical transmission gear only. OTH Cisco knows quite well how to sell IP gear into the incumbent operators. Take Deutsche Telecom as an example. They have 400+ GSR routers in their German IP network alone (and they had Juniper, Nexabit etc. under evaluation before deploying GSRs). I wouldn't call that being unable to sell into "old world" carriers.
re: Was Cerent Worth It?They have 400+ GSR routers in their German IP network alone (and they had Juniper, Nexabit etc. under evaluation before deploying GSRs). I wouldn't call that being unable to sell into "old world" carriers.
yeah, but the whole point is they are not moving closer to the core in terms of market share gains. Granted LR says the extent of 454 sales is pretty good. (and i dont know where they got the number, $750mln) for annual 454 sales. I think that a bit inflated.
No one - they've all been home-brewed deals.
Freethinker