Cisco Peers Facing Mixed Judgement After Earnings (CSCO, ALU, ERIC, JNPR, RVBD, BRCD, HPQ)

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is somehow down all over again despite most of the forecasted bad news already being known ahead of time.  We’ll spare you the details of the layoff and lower guidance news as you probably already know it.  The big issue is that Cisco is just having an impossible time passing itself off as a value stock.

What is interesting is that most Cisco peers are mixed, and we’d expect to see more of them higher than just mixed.  Cisco’s move into the data center and its current shenanigans around product launches and closures is colliding with a restructuring.  The long and short is that customers are choosing to break up their enterprise tech spending dollars and are spreading it among more vendors rather than paying up for just a one-stop shop at Cisco.

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) is the best performing stock of all networking equipment companies so far in 2011.  Shares were up as much as 80% so far in 2011 before its earnings last week.  The ADR is up 1% at $6.19 today, but much of this may be currency change because the ordinary shares in Paris trading were actually down 0.1% in lighter European trading.  LM Ericsson Telephone Co. (NASDAQ: ERIC) doesn’t quite match up against all aspects of the business, but its ADRs are down 1.8% at $14.93 today as its management is giving presentations in New York.

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR) is up 0.2% at $38.54 and it has been referred to over and over as winning business against Cisco in routers and core communications systems.  Another winner today is Riverbed Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: RVBD) with a 2% gain to $36.81 in its wide-area network optimization systems.  Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BRCD) is sort of ‘the poor man’s Cisco’ and its shares are down 0.7% at $6.26 in light trading volume.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) was Cisco’s big target in the data center and its shares are down 0.5% at $40.84.  Both Cisco and H-P were among our ten targets for being the next mega-cap stocks again but for now that will have to wait.

Cisco shares are down 5.3% at $16.84 on more than 87 million shares after about 1 hour and ten minutes of trading.

JON C. OGG