Here's an excerpt from a Business Week article on SAP:
biz.yahoo.com
Just a year ago, nimbler competitors from Silicon Valley were raiding SAP's engineers and salespeople -- as well as its customers. In crucial markets such as supply-chain management, customer-relationship software, and B2B exchanges, SAP lost out to i2, Ariba, and Commerce One. At the height of the Net boom, in March, 2000, those three upstarts boasted a combined market capitalization of $110 billion, more than twice SAP's.
Now, even while SAP stock has tumbled 60%, its struggling competitors have fallen nearly off the charts, to a combined market cap of $9.2 billion -- barely more than half of SAP's value. More important, the upstarts are struggling in the marketplace. Ariba, for example, announced on Apr. 2 that first-quarter revenues would come in 50% short of projections, leading to further pummeling of the stock, which is 97% off its 12 month high. It closed at 4 13/16 on Apr. 4. Commerce One, even while benefiting from a spurt of orders following a 10-month-old alliance with SAP, also issued a profit warning on Apr. 5.
SAP, by comparison, is faring well. Its much-derided e-business initiative, mySAP.com, now appears to be catching on among blue-chip customers, including Unilever (UL ) and Nestle. What's more, its old-fashioned enterprise-software business, which appeared so slow and boring a year ago, now looks safe and profitable.
This should give the company the leverage to grow stronger through the tech downturn. SAP's Net strategy is still no sure thing. But now it can gobble up competitors and ink alliances with bruised stars like Yahoo. Looks like software's tortoise is pulling ahead of the hares.
Now, compare the above with this excerpt from IFMX' press release for 4Q00 results:
biz.yahoo.com
During the quarter, revenue growth at Informix Software, the database company, was driven by the demand for data warehousing, business intelligence, and new Internet applications. Highlights of the quarter include:
Added over 600 new customers worldwide, including many through channels delivering data warehouse and e-business solutions in retail, telecommunications, financial, higher education, public safety and many other vertical markets. Major new customers include Citibank, Speedtrak, Clickability, Genuity and Rythms Netconnections.
Recruited 17 new channel partners including Fiserv (Internet banking), Newtec (Business Intelligence data marts for SAP and Peoplesoft), EBIZ (network security) and Jasmine and Sorrento (network management).
Renewed and expanded its agreement with SAP to resell Informix database products. SAP also selected Informix as the database platform for their internal deployment of MySAP.com.
Was chosen by Citibank in conjunction with Broadvision for their internet-based banking application.
Demonstrated continued strength in the telecommunications market with significant wins including Orange PCS, Ltd., SBC, Lucent Technologies, Vodafone, Nextel, Alcatel, L.M Ericcson, Cisco, AT&T, Motorola, Nortel and Telefonica del Peru.
Won significant data warehouse projects with Fidelity Investments, Galileo International, Vodafone (NZ), Speedtrak, Barnes & Noble, Premier Systems and Bundesanstalt fuer Arbeit.
Shoppers Drug Mart chose the award winning Cloudscape Java database for its point of sale application.
Announced the strategy for Arrowhead(TM), which is envisioned to deliver a single database management system that meets the converging data demands of the new economy.
Expanded and enriched its data warehouse offerings for web and Linux environments with releases of the Red Brick® Decision Server(TM) 6.1, its latest database engine for data warehousing in web and decision-support environments and the Extended Parallel Server(TM) (XPS), its ``high performance and scalability without limits'' database. |
