I hear the issue with Remedy is after sales support and delivery on promises.
I am an investor in several CIS stocks, including ASTEA, Vantive Clarify and Remedy. My latest acquisitions have been in ASTEA (ATEA), which has been down around $2-3 for a year and suffered from a slip in product direction. The news is they have a new President, VP of Marketing and VP of Sales and several new products.
One recent ASTEA venture is Virtual Service Corporation (VSC) and its V-Service(tm) product. VSC is a subsidiary of ASTEA with a joint development agreement with Mitsubishi Electronic America. V-Service uses a fully web browser and Windows CE version of Dispatch-1 (over 1000 user screens) and hosts the application for companies. Users connect through secure virtual private network (VPN) connections over the Internet (to reduce connectivity costs). The application and database are managed by experienced staff so the database type no longer is an issue. Customers can now have the power of Dispatch-1 without the high up front cost of licenses, servers, admin staff training, setup, etc (they pay a flat rate per user or a transaction fee). VSC has had companies using the service for over 7 months with hundreds of end users connecting to their service bureau each day. One customer has over 350 users and is running a 7/24 depot repair operation. Information on VSC can be found in the Astea Annual Report and by talking to their customers. This Internet service bureau, pay-as-you-go, approach is also something Oracle has been talking about with its next release. I think companies will move to outsourced systems with experienced experts managing the systems for them now that VPN security has grown up.
ASTEA has a nice couple of messages -- browser based with something like 1000 user screens and 30 modules, a move to WinCE clients, a new Windows based Service Product (Service Alliance) for the mid market and a hosted system (V-Service) to eliminate the objections about managing a large database system and servers (not to mention there is no up front cost of licenses or servers), etc.
(I hope my cut-and-paste of info on VSC above doesn't lead anyone to believe I work for ASTEA's marketing department - I do not) |
