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Technology Stocks : EXLN - Excelon -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elsewhere who wrote (541)	7/29/2000 11:37:16 PM
From: hasbeen101	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 811

Jochen, my opinion FWIW is that EXLN spends too much on sales and not enough on marketing. I think that face-to-face sales activity will always be expensive. On the other hand, a lot of marketing activities can be done for a relatively fixed cost, which opens the possibility for improved profit margins. I would see the most effective marketing activity as being marketing to software developers, since that gives the most leverage. Example: OSAX is a powerful tool that my company uses. It works really well for giving financial markets end-users access to ObjectStore data from Micrsoft Excel. How many Excel examples ship with OSAX? Zero. OK, how about PowerBuilder, which is used in many financial instititions? Zero again. Providing a few examples would cost a tiny amount, yet it never seems to get to the top of the priority list.

To: Elsewhere who wrote (541)	7/30/2000 3:57:06 PM
From: Bob Trocchi	Respond to of 811

JJ.. Thanks for your full year forecast. Lets here from others and then we can take a look at it in 6 months. >>Sales and mkt as a % of rev. is way way way too high! I don't agree. Many people still don't know eXcelon. Others who know it complain about its low profile, ask Damien. EXLN's percentage is 52% in my model. Ariba had S&M expenditures of $66M on total revs. of $81M in the past quarter, i.e. 81%. << I agree with you that many people do not know EXLN. I would bet that more people know Ariba and they have not been around as long. Could it be due to more effective marketing??? Looking at it another way. I will hazzard a guess that the fully loaded costs of people in Sales and Marketing are around $200K. By fully loaded I mean all the associated costs of S/M including trade shows, ads, etc. If they spend around $40M in S/M that would imply around 200 people. If my assumptions are correct, then that translates to about $400K in Revenue per person. Way to LOW. Now I am not exactly saying that it is too high for the present but if they are ever going to show a profit worthy of "investment," then they need to get that cost to well BELOW 40%. My comment of getting it to 40% is just, IMO, a short term target. >>Profitability is not that important. Here EXLN is doing much better than ARBA or CMRC which are considered to be the "B2B leaders". Top line and especially B2B segment growth is far more important. And in my model EXLN has a "black zero" in Q4, that would be ok for me.<< Lately the "market" is thinking quite differently and is saying profits are important. I know they are in transition to a B2B company but in most cases, profitability especially after a company has ben in business for 9 years is important. In any event, we are close in our projections and we both seem to agree that 2000 will not be one in which we can expect much if any in the way of earnings. Lets hear from others. Regards and Good Investing. Bob T.