Jason,
I am not able to expand a lot more upon Ron Abelmann's comments. Competition for his time was high and thus our exchanges were short. I tried to use my time to ask the many questions that I had rather than pursue a few in depth. Since Michael Real also had questions about the investment firms covering WIND at AEA perhaps a quick description of the conference is in order. The participants consisted of about 2000 institutional money managers and analysts along with over 400 companies. WIND was in Section 1 which lasted a day and a half and included 150 companies. Each company was assigned a hotel room and made a presentation each hour for a total of eleven presentations. The hour typically consists of a 30 to 40 minute presentation by the CEO and CFO followed by Q&A then a five to ten minute period when all of the analysts are in motion to their next company. There is no scheduling - it is completely open. This may sound a little chaotic but in fact it works quite well. Even with the small group format, though, the 10 to 15 minute Q&A does not go very far when everyone is competing to get their questions answered. I did go back to WIND a second time to get some additional air time.
To answer Michael Real's question - UBS, DMG, WA and H&Q were all present at the conference in force. Pilgrim had two representatives but I do not believe that Twentieth Century was there. Wind River's presentations were well attended and there is no doubt in my mind that each of the above companies visited WIND. However, I really cannot personally attest to this nor give any insight to which other companies might be considering initiating coverage. I did do some informal polling as I have done the previous two years to see if analysts to whom I spoke had an opinion on WIND. The results indicated to me that WIND is still not a household name among tech analysts but certainly awareness is growing. In addition, those who knew of WIND all had favorable opinions.
Jason, let me try to address your questions as best I can
1. As far as the NC goes I can not add anything beyond Dave Lehenky's post 2386. Ron really said nothing more about it than what I posted. If I were building a revenue model for WIND my inclination would be to enter zero for NC revenues and if anything shows up treat it as a bonus.
2. I have never seen or heard any discussion about how current automobile royalties are setup or for that matter whether or not there actually are royalties.
3. I also read Allen Benn's postings where he expressed an opinion that the synergy between WIND and Qualcomm on infrastructure would likely give WIND an advantage on the handsets. This is the reason that I asked about the Qualcomm relationship. I hope that Allen's analysis is correct, however, Ron clearly does not share this view.
4. WIND's share of the 32 bit segment of the market was not specifically addressed. However, they made the point that they do not pursue the market below 32 bit at all and 98% of their business is 32 bit related. They said that there is little opportunity for commercial RTOS vendors in the 4, 8, and 16 bit segments. Their growth is all in the 32 bit space.
5. There was no discussion in the sessions which I attended on the ramifications of the Intel takeover of the DEC semiconductor operations.
Regards, Michael |
