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Technology Stocks : Aware, Inc. - Hot or cold IPO? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (7339)	1/11/2000 9:10:00 AM
From: Paul Lee	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9236

full text AWARE, INC. (AWRE); Bedford, MA ' An analyst hails Aware's management, headed by Michael A. Tzannes, President & CEO, as one of the best management teams out there. 'Aware makes software that enables ADSL. They sell it to chip companies, and the chip companies sell the ADSL chips to the equipment guys. Operationally, you can find absolutely no fault with the company. As a matter of fact, business-wise they had a great year. But then there are the rumors and there's the reality. The reality is that they got Intel as a customer, which in and of itself was just a huge win. We will see the results of that in the next couple of years. 'Financially speaking, Aware is run very, very frugally. They've conserved their cash really well. Now they're also making accounting profits, actually accumulating gas, which you can attribute to their CFO, Rick Moberg. He also deserves high marks for his ability to negotiate software and royalty contracts with chip companies. This guy used to be the comptroller of Lotus, so this is somebody who knows where the bodies are buried when it comes to software contracts. 'The quality of the management team at Aware is extremely high. It's one of the best managements out there. This is an incredibly competitive, fast moving business. There are press releases every day about something new in the business. They keep on top of it. And while everybody else is putting out press releases, these guys are going out and signing up new customers. 'Wall Street has really blown hot and cold on Aware's stock. It started in 1999 at $25, went as high as $90, came down to $20, went up to $55, then went up to $50, and now it's down at $33. It's a real roller coaster. It there's any place to fault Aware, it would be on their ability to communicate the strengths of their business to shareholders. And it's not necessarily their fault. The problem is that they're a supplier to a supplier. They're a supplier's supplier. They're a software chip company that sells chips to the equipment guy that sells chips to the phone guy. Aware is at a very early stage here, and they don't have a whole lot of control over their public image. And Moberg has almost done too good of a job of conserving cash, because they don't need to do a public offering. So they can't go out to the investment banks on Wall Street, the big guys, and do a secondary offering that would cause the likes of Weisel or H&Q to get the hype machine going. 'So it's difficult for Aware to play the hype and whisper side of this. If there was one thing that they could have done differently this year, it would have to be in figuring out a way to do that. At the same time, the fact that they don't do it will serve them very well in the long run. One of the reasons they won Intel was that they just shut up. Intel wouldn't have picked Aware if these people didn't have any discretion. Intel could have picked others as their supplier, and one of the reasons why they didn't pick some of the other guys was because the other guys wouldn't stop talking. They're another Qualcomm the Qualcomm of ADSL. As ADSL really moves from being a concept into execution in every household, investors will see where a lot of this stuff is coming from.'