Don't know if VNTV made/beat the quarter or not but SCOP and CLFY news is VERY encouraging (and at least we have gotten to thru Jan 7 without a negative pre-announcement in the external app space). How SCOP pulled off its quarter at such a tumultuous time is especially good news. SCOP built backlog and has tightended up their accounting policies, vowing to never again go through what they went through in Sep/Oct. They pre-announced because they knew they would be speaking at the Morgan Stanley conference and the stock would have gotten very volatile based on speculation. After what happened last quarter (when they presented at a Montgomery conference with a few days left in the quarter), they knew investors would guess based on their body language and reaction to questions. It's crazy to have such conferences during the quiet period. CLFY can't be trusted until they are audited. They have switched accounting practices twice this year.
Here are some dated comments (from late December) from our old friend Chuck regarding CIM:
**Overall CIM Demand
Elsewhere, the big three in the CIM market are all showing signs of
renewed strength. Investors may have written the sector off but
business actually sounds reasonably good relative to past quarters.
Scopus landed a few big deals in recent weeks (e.g. Fidelity) and
Vantive is off to an impressive start with its sales force automation
product (large insurance company deal), which was recently revamped. At a recent luncheon we held for Clarify, the company stated its pipeline coverage had improved significantly in the last three months and sales force hiring was back on track.
**SAP Comes to CIM Market
The CIM players are tracking SAP's announcement of a 50% investment in a German SFA vendor, Kiefer & Veittinger (K&V). SAP has long-range plans to enter the SFA market but hadn't quite gotten around to doing much. K&V jump starts the initiative in SFA , K&V, according to our man on the ground in Europe, Bill Farrell, has around 100 people working on SFA products and 250 customers - 40% of which are also using SAP R/3. SAP claims the K&V technology is all incremental and replaces no SAP product which means SAP hadn't done a lot, of course.
We hear the catalyst for an investment now as the imminent RFP coming
out of Microsoft in January for an SFA product. Microsoft already uses SAP for its backoffice but was leaning toward Siebel for SFA from what we hear. SAP needed to show some product to head Siebel off at the pass and K&V was the fastest route. Given how important the Microsoft relationship is to SAP for marketing reasons, the company may have opted for a faster route to an SFA product.
**Vantive Momentum in SFA
We wouldn't count out Vantive in this and several other SFA deals.
Vantive has rethought the SFA problem and come up with some innovative
additions to its product which is turning a few heads. Instead of
simply automating steps of the traditional steps of the sales process
(contact, qualify, develop, and close) Vantive is focusing on steps of
the customer's buying process (interest, needs assessment, approval,
selection, procurement). Vantive's SFA product matches selling
activities to each step in the buying process as a customer sees them to help get the customer from one step to the next.
The company has spent time with some of the leading consultants on the
selling process and beefed up its product line consirably in release 7
which shipped earlier this month. Vantive also made a bet on Microsoft Outlook and designed its product around this Microsoft Office contact management and Email client. Consequently, Vantive Sales has a Microsoft look and feel and integrates with a product many sales reps are already using.
END
*******************************
Sounds pretty bullish for 1998. Stocks are cheap and business appears to be re-accelerating.
One note, Microsoft is notorious for having other companies open the kimono only to steal the ideas and build in-house so I wouldn't count on too much. That said, this is usually for products MSFT re-sells, not in-house infrastructure. Microsoft has publicly stated they are not in the enterprise apps business and don't want to be. They use SAP in-house so they may very well buy other packaged apps for internal use and steal only what they really want to re-sell. Or NOT. Anybody want to chime in??? |
