Clam,
Meaty post, thanks for your thoughts. However something smells a little fishy in thinking there is no catalyst except for an upgrade from Chuck Phillips. I am going on record to say that if VNTV makes its numbers well see a $40 to 45 stock by the end of the year. Just a hunch.
Regarding CIS history, we'll probably need Mr. Farber's as my involvement only goes back to '93. I recall that the sales automation market was quite fragmented, you had Aurum and Brock, a host of contact mgmt. tools; in fact, the largest player was Sales Technologies which (if I recall correctly) was focused solely on pharma. It certainly did not look like an industry that was ripe for the picking. On the other hand, you had a lot of attention from the business press being paid to customer service; Davidow had just written his book on customer service; and a bunch of software veterans looking for applications to do, and having experience with customer support in the software industry, but virtually no packaged client/server apps serving that market.
In retrospect, SFA doesn't look crowded now-- Siebel is the gorilla-- but back then it seemed very crowded, fragmented, and the formula for building a business was unclear. |
