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Technology Stocks : Software.com, Inc. (SWCM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (129)	9/2/2000 10:41:02 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 142

Fish or Cut Bait: Pick up the Phone.com! By Paul R. La Monica Redherring.com, September 05, 2000 redherring.com WHAT ABOUT WAP? If you liked Phone.com before this merger, you must like it even more now. Here's why. For one, the company scored a major coup in luring away Don Listwin from Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) to be chief executive officer. Mr. Listwin, an executive vice president at Cisco, was widely believed to be the No. 1 candidate for the CEO post once current chief John Chambers retires. You have to wonder how strongly the market would have rewarded these two companies if Mr. Listwin weren't part of the deal. He even admits that his presence was a factor. "The stock market is this interesting balance of fear and greed," he says. "[Investors are] a little less afraid, given my experience." While at Cisco, Mr. Listwin was largely in charge of selling networking equipment to telecommunications providers. The firm certainly has top-notch management. In addition to Mr. Listwin, the current CEOs of Phone.com and Software.com, Alain Rossmann and John MacFarlane, remain with the company. But how will it fare if WAP isn't embraced in the U.S.? Call me crazy, but I don't see the need to plunk down major coin on a splashy new WAP phone just so I can play an X-Men video game. TAKE A MESSAGE This actually isn't as big a concern as you may think. Mr. Listwin says the new company wouldn't be dependent on tons of new content. "I don't think it's all about WAP," he says. "WAP is a piece of access technology." Mr. Listwin talked about other services (all of them sounding like they come straight out of The Jetsons) that the combined company would help enable, such as emailing a virtual dollar from your phone to a soda machine. The true manna from heaven for the combined firm is really unified messaging. Mr. Listwin says: "The service has to be good. Unified messaging, we think, is going to be a killer service. That's not a content play as much as it is a service play." The focus on unified messaging makes even more sense when you consider Phone.com's acquisition earlier this year of Onebox.com, a unified-messaging company that allows users to check email, voice mail, and fax at one Web site. The key to both the Onebox.com and Software.com deals is that the new Phone.com will now be able to offer more than WAP servers and browsers to its existing customer base while also expanding that base substantially. The two companies have about 150 customers overall but only share eight. So, as Mr. Listwin says, as long as the number of wireless Internet access subscribers grows, so too should the demand for Phone.com's products. "This is about managing message flows through wireless devices," <?B> he says.