All: This will be the first post summarizing my impressions and my analysis of the presentations I attended at the VIASOFT International User Conference. These are strictly my opinions, which are derived from personal attendance at the conference, "water cooler" talk with VIAS employees and customers, and some creative operational and technical analysis on my part.
I am not being paid by anyone to do this. It's my way of returning whatever value I can to those folks who have provided investing information and ideas to me through the SI threads. I'll be as objective as I can, and as honest. I have no hidden agenda here. I'll identify any public companies that I have an investment interest in so as to disclose any unintentional bias which might creep into my discussions.
Background: I was a career software techie for 25 years (now retired) and helped visualize, architect, develop, implement and support software that is running IBM mainframe data centers around the world. I know what I'm talking about, and I have a successful track record to back up my claims.
Disclaimer: These are my opinions. Not facts. If you use this information in your investment decisions, you do so at your own risk. That should satisfy any legal issues. At least I hope so.
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The VIASOFT conference was held on June 2-4, 1997. There were two "boot camp" sessions available on Sunday, 6/1/97. One for Data Warehousing, and one for Year 2000. These were "how to" sessions provided by industry experts/consultants (non-VIASOFT employees). On Thursday/Friday, June 5/6, extra training sessions were available on Rochade (repository tool) for additional fees.
Generally, all the customers and participating vendors I saw and spoke with were upbeat about VIASOFT and their involvement with either products or services they own/license. Typically at these shindigs, you'll find one or two disgruntled clients creating waves of discontent. I didn't run into any of them. I was only fortunate enough to attend one day of the conference (Wednesday) so I might have missed any who got peeved and left early.
The Scottsdale Princess resort is a great facility, but don't plan on holding a large conference there during the summer. There was a huge tent set up in the parking lot where the luncheons were served. I heard that on the first day, when the temperature was 108 degrees, there was only one air conditioning duct supplying cool air to the tent. Pity the poor folks who sat at the wrong end of the tent. And, because of some overlapped sessions, there was an "elongated" lunch period. Somehow, they ran out of food before the tail end of the second wave of luncheonees got there. Maybe some attendees were doubling up on meals? At any rate, that was poor planning, either by VIASOFT or the Princess. They got those problems taken care of after day 1, and the VIASOFT conference coordinators said lots of "mea culpas".
Conference content: VIASOFT's acquisition of R&O earlier this fiscal year provided some interesting opportunities to expand the "meat" of the conference. I had attended every prior VIAS conference (8 of them?), and have watched it grow from less than 100 attendees (probably 40 of which were employees) to this year's more than 500 customers, not counting the many VIAS employees and participating vendors. The conference coordinators did a fine job of scheduling sessions so that interested parties could attend "repeat" sessions for those that overlapped sessions they had attended earlier. This was a nice touch, as I've been frustrated in the past trying to "take it all in".
There were 5 separate conference "threads". You could focus in on management issues, VIASOFT product technical "stuff" and futures, Rochade issues and how-tos, Year 2000 issues, or external vendor presentations. Very full agenda, and well planned. My hat's off to those poor stressed out souls who pulled all this together, and made it work. My only suggestion is to bring back those terrific oversized chocolate chip cookies from years past (spoken as a true chocoholic).
Disclosure: For the record, I currently (at this particular moment) have no trading interest in VIAS. However, I do follow the stock religiously and trade it on both the up and down cycles. I try to be out of it at the peaks, where it appears to be now (top?). Never have shorted it, but I do buy into weakness and sell into strength. It shows some predictability, and I like that in a stock.
I have watched ZITL (1/3 owners of privately owned Matridigm) for several months primarily as a "training" vehicle (I'm a rookie investor). I made one severe miscalculation on a timing issue and bought into it a few days before Titow (Matridigm's former President) was ... uh .... before he left the company. I sold for a $11 per share loss a few weeks later at 20. Chalk one up to experience. I don't intend to make that mistake again. I'll stick to more predictable stocks.
I'm very interested in privately owned Peritus, as they have filed for a NASDAQ listing (PTUS). I don't know when that will take place.
My Y2K gambling funds are all tied up right now in some of the available thin float stocks. None of them were present at the VIASOFT conference. Incidentally, I like KEA, CA, CACI (currently invested) and CPWR (VIAS competitor). Wish I had followed my gut feel on these over the past two years. Oh, well ...
OK, enough of the generalities, let's get down to business/details ...
I was very interested in any of the sessions that dealt with the Year 2000. Even though I'm retired, I still get plenty of calls/emails from prior clients who are looking for the best mousetrap on the shelf. So, I try to stay abreast of the latest news just so I can steer them in the right direction. (Maybe I should charge for that service? Nah .. not worth the extra effort it would take to track the income. Besides, I'd feel guilty for charging them for something I enjoy doing so much.)
Since there were several outside vendors at the conference, I had plenty of options to choose from. I only had a limited amount of time, so I zero'd in on Matridigm and Peritus, but also collected info on some of the others.
Bridge 2000 (B2K): I attended VIASOFT's B2K technical presentation, given by the Development Project manager. It was a techno-phobes dream. Very technical. Very detailed. More so than some of the attendees were looking for, but it was exactly what I wanted. Bridge 2000 is interesting technology that has its niche in the Year 2000 process. The basic premise is that you can make changes to your code prior to making changes to the data. A typical non-B2K conversion process requires a more-or-less simultaneous change activity, which can become a scheduling nightmare when several programs and files are being changed all at once. B2K has a "soft hook" into the operating system that intercepts I/O requests and turns the accessed record over to a routine that "knows" which version of the record the program wants. That means that the record layout in the program can be expecting an expanded 4 digit year (CCYY, where CC is the century ... 19 or 20, and YY is the year ... like 97), but the data on the file hasn't been converted yet, so it still only has 2 digits (97). Note that this implies knowledge of a sliding "calendar window" so that B2K's conversion routine will know whether to tack on a 19 or a 20 to the 97. The user can choose the "window" for each date field. B2K is still in Beta, but scheduled to be released to the general public sometime in June. Expect a press release shortly. This should do wonders for the stock price. Possible short comings here are the limited file formats it supports. Currently, only QSAM and VSAM, which accounts for a large majority of files in MVS legacy code. Batch and CICS are supported (CICS through standard CICS supplied file access exits), but I missed the portion that discussed IMS and DB2 because I was called away for other discussions. IDMS is not supported, and from that I would expect that several of the "also ran" database handlers aren't either. I wasn't around to hear the "what's happening next" part of the discussion.
Other VIAS "stuff" I picked up in water cooler talk ... much time is being spent making the data that is collected by the "front-end" of the Y2K analysis tool available to outside vendors. This is what has been going on behind the scenes with the Matridigm collaboration. From the analysis side, PL/I and Assembler support is ready, or almost ready (couldn't tell from the marketing smoke screen). There is a significant amount of planning and technical preparation for leveraging the Rochade repository. This will take quite a bit of doing, but VIAS is pinning their future hopes on access to the application knowledge they worked so hard to collect. Should make for some interesting tools to come out in the future, beyond the Y2K frenzy. From a revenue perspective, it was nice to see that all the sales folks who were present were smiling broadly. And, those weren't the "smile because you have clients around" smiles. They were the "I'm smiling because I've exceeded quota" smiles. You can tell whether an R&D company is growing by their hiring record. VIAS brought in 15 new development employees in May, and they have over 150 openings worldwide (all VIAS, not just development). I only got 4 offers for employment. Kind of disappointing, but I guess the word is out that I am firmly retired. Ahhhh .... the good life. What a country!
There was an interesting presentation by ISPW (www.ISPW.com). It's a programmer's workbench that ties lots of tools from various vendors together. There were lots of questions asked, and good reports from the people who have actually used the software. Two separate client organizations gave the presentation from an organizational and migration perspective. Another session highlited the technical end of it, but since I was actually involved with the implementation of ISPW at a site, I skipped that one. This is a great vehicle to standardize access to a programmer's daily functions, which has several positive side effects. The most important one is that much time is saved by eliminating operational errors. It could also significantly ease the Y2K transition because it has version controls built into it. Nice package. Very clean, technically. If ISPW goes public, it would be fun to watch. I don't know if they have any notion of doing that, though. Maybe an acquisition candidate for a larger vendor?
This post has gone on long enough. Well, OK ... too long. I'll put the Matridigm and Peritus comments in other posts.
If you have any questions, please ask.
Regards,
TED |
