Leeza: It is difficult for me to see what NETP product or service BFRE would be competing with. NETP has 7 software products and 4 ASP products or services. BFRE appears to offer a service of acting as a kind of broker or agent or traffic cop for merchants, in any sector, and innumerable web sites which will host their product or service for a fee. The merchant pays the web site only if there is a sale and BFRE picks up a piece of the fee. BFRE performs this service through cookie implants which counts the clicks and the transactions.
NETP does nothing like this. You may be referring to the licence arrangement that NETP charges for some of its products. For example, NETP has Lycos as a customer and Lycos runs an electronic mall so that Lycos charges its customers by either click thru or sales, and NETP gets a part of that fee. This is not NETP's main source of revenue. Up till now NETP's main sources of revenue are the enterprise wide software installations with an average sales price of $340,000. Typically, these are not for dot-com customers but for major bricks and mortar retailers which have multi-channels including an internet channel. NETP might provide a real-time personal recommendation engine for their telephone call-centres and their online marketing, and ad targeting software, and an e-mail software, and deep analytics of their customer data base, or link them to other data basis. It might also offer a knowledge management product. These large scale sales are NETP's main focus and it uses its own sales force to achieve them (and the sales force will double this year).
In addition, NETP has some 40 partners which sell its software and is progressively winning a higher percentage of its revenues from their efforts (38% last quarter). Some of those have a licence arrangement with NETP, as in the Lycos example).
The closest comparison with BFRE seems to be NETP's new ASP products introduced in 2Q. For a discussion of those, here is a transcript of the NETP cc in the segment in which questions were asked about the pricing. It is not that informative. For more information go to the NETP web site, go back a month or two through the press releases. If you skim back through my posts about two weeks ago I posted an independent media aticle about the NETP ASP's and the whole subject.
Message 14153604
Message 14148657
netperceptions.com
You will see that NETP is the first company in its field to host an ASP (and it also uses third-party ASP's) to offer a suite of products called The Personalization Network. They are designed for customers which cannot afford the full NETP enterprise software installation or who dont need the power. The prices are in the range you mentioned for the BFRE product. They would be ideal for the kind of dot.coms BFRE appears to be targetting (and I know they are not restricted to them). In addition, large multi-channel retailers might want to get up to speed quickly and cheaply by buying the ASP then upgrading to the enterprise class software.
So NETP is tackling the low-end market and is also charging about $5,000 per product a month as well as a licence fee based on click throughs with som eof the products. ASP services could become a huge source of revenue to NETP but is presently only 2%. The cost of these sales is low and the ASP allows it to reach anywhere in the world. NETP hopes to gain not only from the profit margins on the services but also from upselling and cross selling to those ASP clients who develop a need and the financial ability to go for the more powerful stuff.
I hope I have not misrepresented BFRE, which was unknown to me until you mentioned it. As far as I know, NETP does not name BFRE as one of its competitors in its Form 10. |
