This is a little old news, but still interesting. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had an article on SEEC on June 15, and the following is its exerpt. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The turn of the century is helping pull up the stock prices for a couple of Pittsburgh high-tech companies.... SEEC Inc. of Pittsburgh, a software companyt, and Mastech Corp. of Oakdale, an information technology service company, both are in the business of fixing the glitch. And as Wall Street and the business community have started taking the so-called Year 2000 problem more seriously, the companies' stock prices have risen dramatically.
SEEC is trading roughly three times higher than January's initial public offering price of $7.25. Shares jumped 11 percent in a single day last week after SEEC announced a new business deal with IBM's Global Services division. IBM intends to use SEEC's software to fix clients' systems around the world. Because SEEC's fee depends on how much IBM uses the software, it is impossible to say how lucrative the deal will be, said Ravi Koka, SEEC president and chief executive. Still, said Avalon Research securities analyst Michael Harrold, the IBM deal "gives SEEC another tremendous endorsement."
...Harrold said he had plenty of company when he examined SEEC's software tools at a computer-users show in New York in March. "I saw a lot of the large Wall Street firms had actually gone to this trade show...You could see a lot of the ivnestor community walking up and down the aisles asking pertinent questions," he said.
Both SEEC and Mastech offer a range of products and services that go beyond the Year 2000 challenge, so their markets won't disappear in 2001, analysts and company officials say. SEEC focuses on software designed to maintain the programs that run large mainframe computers, Harrold said. "And the mainframe ain't going away, so they'll continue to have business...We expect this to be a long-term name," he said.
SEEC was originally incorporated in 1988 as The Software Engineering and Enhancement Center and it introduced its first product in 1992. The company's software enables computer programmers to use desktop PCs to maintain or change the COBOL programming codes used in mainframe computers. It was co-founded by Raj Reddy, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's computer science school. |