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Technology Stocks : Verifone (VFI)

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To: Clam Clam who wrote (334)	4/25/1997 6:56:00 PM
From: Andrew Dent	of 369

Since Verifone is dead <sob> and I am not sure how to move this to the Oracle/MS thread I will ramble. Someone help me out here if its possible.The db wars are much like the os wars of old.Microsoft is first and foremost a platform company. Ontop of Microsoft platform business (languages/OS) Microsoft have also built and extremely successfull Applications Business. This was and easy jump for Microsoft to make - its not to hard to pull in a couple of MBA's and admins in to work out what features they want to see in a Word Processor/Spreadsheet. Five years ago it became pretty obvious the the vertical enterprise application business held a lot of dollars - this is when R3 started to take off big time. The jump from a personal productivity applications developer to vertical enterprise builder is a different thing altogehter. This is a different business and one I believe Gates was not interested in tackling by himself. Gates loves a horizontal, mass market, high margin business.MS Sales force and channel models were simply not setup to do this.Rather than develop a sales force and a channel Microsoft has chosen the strategy of lining up third party vendors to write to their platform - witness Microsoft getting into bed with SAP to drive NT/SQL sales. Oracle has been smart to pick up gap in MS Business but in puts them at loggerheads with both the two monsters SAP(Apps) MS(SQL). MS will start eating Oracle with broad third party vertical vendor support and tight integration with Back Office. In the long haul I believe this strategy will be successful.Re your question regarding pricing pressure. I dont believe price is a big concideration for fortune 1000 for this class of application as buying from SAP/Oracle/BAAN is a lot cheaper than their legacy/custom/mainframe systems. For small/med size business's (mass market) the story is a lot different and third party vendors on NT/SQL will look a lot more attractive on price than the high end vendors (witness Onyx licencing SQL server runtime edition).I would rather not talk specifically about the technical issues re Oracle/SQL - you can read the propaganda for yourself. Sufficient to say Oracle has the lead technically - although this can make or break a sale I don't believe its an overidding factor. The nail in the Informix coffin last quarter speaks well to how much a technical lead can get you in this business.

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