Diane-
How about a sense of the market pressures? We are up almost a buck and the previous post says it is retail.
A couple of thoughts from my desk...
The financial community seems to have finally formally split the computer industry between hardware and software vendors. The asian woos and worries from the HW front have been dispelled by MSFT and others. ORCL is moving up as well. This might be raising peoples expectations for RATL.
They have history of leaks, so maybe something has come out. If it is retail movement, that wouldn't make as much sensesense, but maybe we can expect some good moves for the quarter.
I do know that they have closed their fiscal year with a huge number of orders and are totally overwhelmed in packaging and shipping. From my knowledge of the way software companies work, RATL probably threw some additional incentives together for their sales force to finish out the year strongly. If they didn't, they should have- it has been a long year for RATL sales force and finishing up on a strong note would be a line level success and an executive level success. If they have finished as strongly as it appears, watch out for the stock price because it will mean they are only strengthening their industry leading positions and it will answer ALOT of questions from the analyst and institutional community.
Given deferred revs from past quarters and the fact that they have received such overwhelming orders, I see little risk with this quarters numbers- others may think the same thing.
Competition- some friends from the thread, through email, have been commenting about competition. I see PLAT posing a major threat, but RATL has a distinct advantage- MSFT. PLAT works closely with MSFT but on a product which is not as widely used and understood, Repository vs. Visual Modeler. Without the VM deal for RATL, I would be seriously considering moving my app dev portion of portfolio somewhere else, possibly PLAT. I see PLAT facing major issues with consolidation and remember, they only have 8% marketshare in modeling. They are still, for the most part, a mainframe company moving to CS and consolidating acquisitions.
Anyway, just some thoughts on the recent movement, I think it is probably the market assuming RATL will meet their earnings expectations. |
