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Technology Stocks : Agile Software Corp- ( AGIL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: $Mogul who wrote (230)	9/20/1999 2:36:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 570

Look at ROWE...another play on B2B. To: stockman_scott (13024 ) From: Mark Z Monday, Sep 20 1999 1:02PM ET Reply # of 13031 From Briefing.com. This may explain some of ICGE's meteoric rise. The net sector dujour for the past month or so has been B2B: B2B : Business-to-business ecommerce stocks are on the move today, as momentum in this sector continues following Friday's Goldman Sachs report that projected the size of this market to be $1.5 tln by 2004. We have now battled through the 112 page Goldman report, and would offer just a few observations. Most importantly, we would note that not all B2B stocks are created equal. The big winners of late have been the "horizontal" B2B stocks; those that offer the hope of tapping into the broad B2B market (that $1.5 tln pot of gold) by offering a central location for B2B commerce for many industries. These horizontals include Ariba (ARBA), CommerceOne (CMRC), and VerticalNet (VERT). (Yes, that's right -- VerticalNet is a horizontal B2B company; go figure.) The vertical B2B companies are those that are targetting a specific market; examples in the public market include pcOrder.com (PCOR) and Chemdex (CMDX). Though the verticals are actually further along in proving their business models, they do not offer the lottery ticket prospect of tapping into that $1.5 tln. In opting for the vertical approach, they have limited their upside to their specific markets. Unlike the B2C world, where Amazon.com (AMZN) has been able to shift from vertical (bookseller) to horizontal (all-purpose etailer), B2B verticals will have much greater difficulty in shifting from their area of expertise (imagine pcOrder.com trying to sell itself as a chemical B2B). The market much prefers the lottery ticket and is therefore bidding up the horizontals, much as it did in the early days of B2C. Another important similarity between the current B2B craze and the early days of B2C is that a supply/demand imbalance in the market is contributing mightily to the price gains. With only the three horizontals noted above and Internet Capital Group (ICGE) serving as the CMGI (CMGI) of the B2B world, a huge pool of B2B bets is flowing into just a handful of stocks. The results are predictable. - GJ Next Previous