Agree about the fact that this call again left some fog. However, lets hope that those on the conference call were in contact with reality and have a little luck thinking through the fog.
Sometimes, I think that the very fact that ISLI tries to be honest on these calls chases all these money folks off into the closet where they turn off the lights and start probing for ghosts. The MCI renegotiation did come up but clearly it was stated that it could result in more business as well as less business
Listened to the conference call and by all measures it was quite positive (I don't believe in ghosts), IMHO. The very thought that just maybe the soon-to-be announced DST deal heralds the company's ability to regularly sell 7-figure ASM/SCM deals makes any possible downturn in the MCI business look like peanuts in comparison - IMHO. Guess the Deutsch Telecom deal to be announced tomorrow might just be considered the second such deal. And in reality ISLI had several such deals last year. Now lets see, how many thousands of major corporations are there worldwide who might be a prospect for such a deal ???? Probably about 400 large insurance companies in the U.S. alone. Dream on: thats a couple of year's business.
For the most part, ISLI's 3 main businesses are operating on all 4 cylinders.
Gary Greenfield did spend time trying to address some of the imagined ghosts in the closet from the past conferences. For example, the Y2K business is
growing by leaps and bounds today and will not be going away anytime soon. ISLI is building this business so it will not go away once 12/31/99 arrives. That is, what is really being build here is an application renewal business. And it does not take a degree in physics
to see that there are plenty of opportunities for renewal once the Y2K thing slows down (sometime after the year 2005). For
example, the Euro dollar thing is larger and queued right up for attention. Then there is all kinds of mergers, deregulations,
regulations and so on going on that have the potential to call for massive application renewal business. Gary finally pointed out that
ISLI's tools and methodology are general purpose and appropriate for these varied renewal requirements.
Maybe ISLI should become the infrastructure company. Lets see: ASQ as the infrastructure for enterprise software development, Data Direct as the infrastructure for universal data access (every distributed application needs it), and application renewal as the infrastructure application migration (or something like that). Anyway, just doodling.
A few more thoughts along the way on what was really an excellent call, IMHO.
ÿ |
