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Technology Stocks : WebMethods,Inc. (WEBM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (105)	7/27/2000 1:42:53 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 161

He did say that their software products are "renewed" every two years. I'm not quite sure what that means. Are they renting their software? I don't know how revenue is booked for the OEM deals. The only company I've ever worked with that had OEM deals was Oracle - if I recall they used to practically give the engine away but there was a royalty agreement of sorts. So that is a form of "renting" I guess. The OEM stuff is probably not much $$, but the intent is to grab market share so those are the most important deals I would say. The problem is it takes resources from the sales dept and not much money comes through to the bottom line at first. Webm has Arba, Cmrc, I2 tradematrix, Mysap and some others so when those are sold I would guess webm gets some small %. Then there are the vertical exchanges and regular customers who buy software outright - that half of the b2bi business is regular software model. And the entire EAI business - aswx has a regular software model, you don't OEM that. Ordinarily I don't read yahoo but you might check the yahoo boards for this stock and ASWX, not many posters and some knowledgeable people. Since the revenue is so tricky the metric I am focussing on is new customers added. Even that isn't straightforward because there is this issue of quality. However for now webm has top quality customers. They added 38 new customers in the prior quarter and 49 this quarter. Ariba added 100 new customers last quarter so thats the high water mark. 49 customers is as much as you are going to get for a company of this size. When the sales force doubles thanks to active I'm sure they will get 100 customers/quarter. I already told you this on another thread but in case anybody is reading this now, BEA is another company looking good in this emerging space. Forget the other EAI vendors like Tibco, their revenue looks strong but they compete with Active, not webm. Thats inside the firewall stuff which is good and necessary but not where the big opportunity is.