A very poorly thought out piece, I'd say. First of all, the author apparently is under the impression that the day after you hire a programmer you can begin selling his work. In actual fact I would guess that the impact will not really be felt for 12-18 months.
Then the author makes an apples to oranges comparison to justify a claim that BOBJ is bigger than COGN. In actual fact the best quarter of the year for BOBJ is the December quarter, and the best quarter of the year for COGN is the February quarter. Comparing the December BOBJ quarter to the November COGN quarter is favorable to BOBJ, and comparing the March quarter to the February COGN quarter will be favorable to COGN - but the author won't be around to do that.
Are the increased expenditures at COGN producing results? No question about it (probably the sales staff increases more so that the R&D increases, at least so far). In actual fact the growth rate of COGN is clearly accelerating. Looking solely at the BI part of COGN, the year over year growth rate was languishing between 26-32% until two quarters ago, when the growth rate increased to over 40%. The last two quarters have shown year over year growth rates of 42.4% and 41.4%.
How about the competition? BOBJ has has year over year growth in the 45% range for some time. This has not changed recently. As for BRYO, they have been running at about 68% recently. MSTR has been around 90%, and SGNT has been a bit over 100%.
Basically the article reinforced my opinion that BOBJ is way overvalued relative to COGN. COGN is still larger, COGN is now growing at about the same rate, COGN is spending more heavily to assure future growth. I'll keep my money here,
Carl |
