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Technology Stocks : Siebel Systems (SEBL) - strong buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shane M who wrote (2876)	6/30/1999 2:34:00 AM
From: mauser96	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

Perhaps SEBL thought the allegations were phoney. Otherwise why would they hire him? Certainly it's not good news this near earnings. If it turns out to be true that fraudulent or dishonest behavior took place SEBL should dump him immediately and get it out of the way. Maybe it's lie detector time. Credibility with Investors and analysts are critical for SEBL at this stage of the gorilla game,

To: Shane M who wrote (2876)	6/30/1999 3:24:00 AM
From: dbblg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

hi Shane, I have a vague recollection that there was some discussion (and possibly an analyst comment or two) about this when IFMX hit the fan, around Sept. 97 or so. It has been a while since I looked at the allegations, but my impressions, for whatever they are worth: -the percentage of sales in question at IFMX seems too high for top management to have been totally unaware, imo; BUT -the difference in business models makes a literal redux unlikely; AND -if Tom felt Graham in any way threatened his company, he would have kicked him over the side without a second thought long before now. I am currently out of SEBL, though I have owned it several times in the past. While I owned SEBL I generally rationalized the CFO thing by assuming Graham would be extra-conservative in light of the cloud he has been under. Best of luck...

To: Shane M who wrote (2876)	6/30/1999 10:15:00 AM
From: Lee L.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6974

CFO has a history of aggressive or some would say fraudulent revenue recognition This is old, old, old news. Howard Graham left Informix just before Phil White was booted out of IFMX for fraudulent revenue recognition practices. Given that Graham's finger-prints are all over the IFMX disaster, should we suspect that Siebel's numbers are tainted? In my opinion, no. There is 0.002% possibility that Graham would apply these techniques at Siebel. The entire software industry has learned from the financial reporting disasters at Oracle, Informix and others. As for Graham himself, I'm sure that every transaction in his group is closely controlled. As a Siebel customer, I was contacted on two occasions by their auditor to verify that my order letters were valid. Siebel may screw-up somewhere, but it won't screw-up its financials.