Tekboy,
Since I know you are an investor in i2 Technologies, this was a nice synopsis of the i2/Ariba/IBM alliance as well as the story on why the sales executive who had only been with i2 the past 8 months after working at Oracle for many years was 'requested to pack his bags'. There's also a quality explanation of the contract the alliance was bidding on for the health care industry exchange who opted to outright buy the company called Centrimed (a niche B2B health care specific company that was nurtured under ICGE) to acquire their 85 employees. It's still not known if the health care exchange will need some of the picks, tools and shovels from one of the alliance members, but it could very well as their exchange project gets underway. Regardless, you know how some players in the stock market like to utilize whatever they can get their fingers around for a short term swing. "Stock rape" is what I call it.
Worth the read:
msdw.com
Much talk of the Oracle vs. Siebel situation on this board, but the i2/Ariba/IBM alliance is the other application foe that Ellison and team are up against. We need to hearken back to the revised manual's words between page 72 and page 75.
• Enabling-technology gorillas should be at the heart of every gorilla game portfolio
• Software application gorillas should be a part of - indeed, probably the major part of - every gorilla-game portfolio
The Fat Pipe posts you refer to, Tekboy, were an effort to demonstrate to some Fools about the maturity of the 20+ year PC technology adoption life cycle and the more youthful IP/Broadband technology adoption life cycle having compelling reasons for investment study purposes. The series to date has dealt primarily with the enabling-technology, but the other half of the Next Generation Networks is the all important network application market where companies like Siebel, Oracle, i2, Ariba, CommerceOne, PeopleSoft, SAP, BEA Systems and many others are playing. They will have solutions that dominate that side of the global network and how it is utilized.
Of course the authors justify the reasoning that they say "the major part of" one's portfolio should be made up of the software application vendors is based on the risk assumption that more of them are able to survive where as proportionately fewer enabling-technology companies will do well. Yet, we know the benefits and structure of the layers in technology to balance out our portfolios in an appropriate manner.
BB
(Joel, if you're reading this - make sure you catch the link above concerning i2.) |
