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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla Game Investing in the eWorld -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Teflon who wrote (426)	10/12/1999 12:30:00 PM
From: James Sinclair	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1817

Thanks for the post James. Before I go any further I will suggest that there will probably be some other big wins for BVSN in the near future, though some might start to wonder if they will adequately be able to service all of this work (IMHO). The issue I have with BVSN is that I do not see any portion of their business as proprietary in nature, or product/service offering that enables high costs of switching. I'd be open for debate on this, but I don't yet see it. Having said that, I am selling puts on the stock as part of my "non-GG" investing strategy -- I love the stock. But for the purposes of this Thread and the G&K, I need some convincing First, a confession. I just received by revised copy of the FM yesterday and have been a little distracted with a certain local baseball team, so I haven't had a chance to read the new material on the Internet yet. That said let me try to address the question. 1. Proprietary technology Searched the IBM patent server for patents held by the company. Came back with 1 hit (US5710887: Computer system and method for electronic commerce). While I'm not going to even pretend to try and read patents, my understanding of the companies strength is that the product can generate custom content for an individual customer, and it appears the patent relates to this capability. So the proprietary technology isn't really internet related, but rather in the algorithms for matching products to customers. 2. Value Chain You expressed concerns about their ability to support the design wins they have in the pipe. My understanding is that they're relying on systems integration partners to do much of the implementation work. Check out their partner list on their web site. I cherry picked the following names from the systems integrator list: Andersen Consulting Cambridge Technology Partners Computer Sciences Corporation KPMG Sapient Corporation Someone on the SI BVSN board a while back suggested that the big consulting firms were pulling people off ERP projects and training them on how to support BVSN implementations because they saw the demand growing so explosively in this area (sorry, I looked for the message but couldn't find it). 3. Switching Costs From what I've heard, the BVSN product is not exactly cheap to implement. Once its up and working (and by all accounts it gets a very high level of customer satisfaction once the implementation is complete), why would a company want to toss all that investment and start over with something else?