I do not believe the companies that are successful in the space - VNTV, RMDY, SCOP, etc. are vulnerable. They continue to make investments in technology, and manage their organizations well enough to crank out good technology.
Sales Tech's product was not current, and there was limited investment for the future. They were vulnerable - and lost to other orgs building sales automation products, like VNTV, SEBL, AURM, etc.
Regarding your DBMS example: last time I looked, IBM is making a huge amount of money on their mainframe databases - which was always their area of strength and focus. DEC was making big money on their DBMS for the VMS market, but the VMS market tanked, and they did NOT have a product or organization focused on the UNIX market. Their offering on UNIX was weak, and the ENTRENCHED competition from ORCL, SYBS, IFMX and even Ingres was too strong.
Regarding AT&T - you got me there, since I worked for AT&T in the early 80's, and then next sold them millions of dollars worth of DBMS products and technology and was deep inside their software R&D and product groups while I was at IFMX, and I never did encounter this DBMS product you refer to. Could you tell me what product you were thinking of? I hope you are not referring to Tuxedo, which was not a DBMS at all, but rather a transaction monitoring system, or some piece of internal code which was never commercialized.
I can't speak specifically to Metrix or RTS. BUt, I know CLFY and VNTV are moving hard into that space. Let me put it this way. I make a angel investments in start-up and pre-public companies. The value of those investments is in the seven figures. I see a lot of business plans. I would not invest a nickel today into a company trying to compete with VNTV, SCOP, CLFY, RMDY, et al, unless the valuation were so ridiculously low on investment that the company didn't have to do much for an investor to make a profit.
If it were a company trying to make money in the call center/customer information market by solving some problem not addressed by those companies, that's something else, and might be worth considering. But a direct competitor at something over a $5 or 10 million valuation - forget it - better investments elsewhere. |
