I have been keeping an ear to the ground over the weekend and should have posted this sooner, but I had to get out of the noxious fumes in my apartment. Ah, well, the market hasn't opened yet, so it's still timely.
It does not sound as though there was any "new" news during the meeting. If the thread had been attendance, we should not have been staggered by anything that was said. However, the meeting apparently did serve to restore some of the credibility of the management, which has been so woefully missing: It is one thing to see the potential of Windchill; it is another to believe that the company can execute on this potential.
It appears that this meeting did much to support the comparisons drawn by Walske during the conference call to competitors such as Agile, Ariba, and CommerceOne, whose valuations are substantially higher than the market valuations assigned to these smaller companies. Even better, there was a clear distinction drawn between companies such as Ariba and CommerceOne, which heretofore have focused on e-based commodity trading, and Windchill's focus on Web-based collaboration and commerce for complex products and services. Agile appears to be the closest competitor to Windchill. Parametric is looking to partner with the various emerging trading exchange companies.
To date Windchill has 300 customers. Of these, about one half are the traditional Pro/E installed base customers; roughly a quarter the installed base of Computervision; the remainder are altogether new customers. Lockheed Martin, one of the pilot sites for Windchill, gave an enthusiastic presentation on the benefits already derived.
On the basis of the reinvigorated faith in the company's ability to execute on the promise of Windchill, the market is more likely to follow the course suggested by a number of thread members--namely, to value the company on a sum-of-the-parts basis. |
