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Technology Stocks : Viador (VIAD) - Enterprise Portal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carl R. who wrote (128)	5/29/2000 10:53:00 AM
From: Carl R.	Respond to of 294

One other question for you, Walter. I note in reading the financials for VIAD that spending on R&D dropped precipitously in the last quarter while spending on marketing continued to accelerate. Q299 Q399 Q499 Q100 R&D 1.051 1.643 2.416 1.306 Sales 2.429 2.86 4.009 6.256 Sales/R&D 2.3 1.7 1.7 4.8 Do you have any idea why the spending on R&D fell so sharply? Were they hiring a bunch of contract programmers to complete the product? I have no problem with the big jump in Sales expense, which I hope bodes well for future sales, but I'm not used to seeing R&D spending fall, much less fall so dramatically. Also, as regards the ratio of Sales to R&D, the shift from 1.7 to 4.8 is quite dramatic. The typical ratio in this software area seems to be in the area of 3. In smaller companies it tends to be lower, and in bigger companies it tends to be closer to 4. Here are some comparisons: BOBJ 4.6 BVSN 4.4 AUTN 4.1 COGN 3.9 BRIO 3.7 INFA 3.3 EPNY 3.0 ACTU 2.7 MCTR 2.7 MSTR 2.6 SGNT 2.2 SQSW 2.0 TIBX 1.4 Thus VIAD went from one extreme to the other. Any idea what happened? Maybe the answer is that they took a bunch of developers and turned them into technical sales support people.... Carl

To: Carl R. who wrote (128)	5/30/2000 6:46:00 PM
From: Walter Morton	Respond to of 294

I think you should cut and paste that into an email and send it to the VIAD's Investor Relations department. In the mean time I will go look up competition in the SEC filings. I need a better understanding also. Actually, I haven't been watching VIAD closely for several months. But when the price when down so low it got my attention again.

To: Carl R. who wrote (128)	5/30/2000 6:57:00 PM
From: Walter Morton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 294

Competition (From the S-1 Filing) The market for our products is intensely competitive, subject to rapid change and significantly affected by new product introductions and other market activities of industry participants. Our primary source of direct competition comes from independent software vendors of corporate portal software, and from providers of business intelligence tools that have or may be developing business intelligence portal products. We also face indirect competition from potential customers' internal development efforts. Our major competitors in the corporate portal field tend to be early stage private companies. In addition, several major business intelligence vendors have introduced business intelligence portal products as a way to integrate their business intelligence tools. At least one enterprise resource planning company has introduced a portal (Peoplesoft) and we expect more will do so. These companies may begin to sell their product along with their enterprise resource planning application suites. We also expect to face competition from new entrants. Most of the major enterprise resource planning providers and larger business intelligence tools providers have a significantly installed customer base and have the opportunity to offer additional products to those customers as additional components of their respective enterprise resource planning application suites or business intelligence tools. We believe that the principal competitive factors considered in selecting enterprise information portal solutions are comprehensive access to existing IT infrastructure, security, scalability, personalization and filtering capabilities and an installed referenceable base of customers. We believe that our ability to access a wide variety of data sources is a major benefit to existing and future customers. The corporate portals are targeted at providing access to unstructured data in the form of websites and documents, while the business intelligence portals are targeted at integrating and accessing structured data, and the enterprise resource planning portals are targeted at individual applications. Many of our competitors in both the business intelligence and enterprise resource planning markets have longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources, significantly greater name recognition and a larger installed base of customers. Moreover, a number of our competitors, particularly major enterprise resource planning vendors, have well-established relationships with our current and potential customers as well as with systems integrators and other vendors and service providers. In addition, these competitors may be able to respond more quickly to new or emerging technologies and changes in customer requirements, or to devote greater resources to the development, promotion and sale of their products, than we can. It is also possible that new competitors, alliances among competitors or other third parties may emerge and rapidly acquire significant market share. We expect that competition in our markets will increase as a result of consolidation and the formation of alliances in the industry.