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Technology Stocks : DRIV (DIGITAL RIVER). Get in on internet IPO. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbkelle who wrote (3033)	12/11/2000 9:52:44 AM
From: david james	Respond to of 3198

Nabisco and Digital River zdnet.com ..... The company began evaluating the major players in April. It looked at more than a dozen service providers before narrowing the field to four possibilities. In July the company settled on Digital River, the service provider behind sites for 3M, Fujitsu, Siemens, and thousands of others. The reasons? The company's storefront templates meant that Nabisco Gifts could be open for business in time for the holidays. Digital River's fraud-protection technologies were vastly superior to what Nabisco could cobble together quickly. Digital River's server farms—stocked with redundant Sun computers—promised the reliability, scalability, and bandwidth Nabisco wanted in place from the get-go. Fordham was sold. "The major driver for me," she explains "was their front-end expertise—the large amount of e-commerce experience they had, their ability to link seamlessly with our fulfillment partner, and their ability to partner with us in developing online marketing programs." So what about costs and time to market? Setup cost less than $250,000, and monthly fees will run less than $10,000. If Nabisco decides to make major enhancements to the site, it will pay extra. But chances are Digital River will have worked on similar projects for one of its other clients and can spread out the costs. Nabisco also plans to tap Digital River for online marketing campaigns—another area where its expertise is greater than Nabisco's. "From a cost perspective, it's difficult to compare an in-house alternative," Fordham hedges. "The way we thought about it was that Digital River was giving us a much more capable, attractive e-commerce site for similar dollars." Perry Steiner, president of Digital River, estimates that most companies will spend $50,000 to $250,000 up front and $10,000 to $40,000 per month for hosting when they go out of house for their e-commerce solution. That price of admission buys you 24/7 management of your site. "Our business strategy?" says Steiner with a laugh. "Don't spend a penny on e-commerce. Outsource it all to us." By September the NabiscoGifts site was up and running in a controlled test: ordering and shipping gifts across the country. The site was on target to open for business in November—in time for the holidays. "Our goal for the first year," Shurts says, "is for every customer who orders from us to be thrilled." Fordham is less categorical about their expectations for profits. "Our experience is still limited," she says. But based on the e-business initiatives of others, she expects the site to "pay back very quickly, generally within the year." Nabisco's bricks-and-mortar distribution channel could throw a wrench in the works if it senses a competitive threat from the site. Shurts explains that for now, the company is walking gingerly around the problem by selling Internet-only products from NabiscoGifts. Eventually, gift recipients could find in their cookie baskets coupons for . . . bricks-and-mortar retailers. Nabisco plans to encourage its distributors to sell Nabisco gift baskets from their own Web pages. When customers click on a wheelbarrow of Oreos at Walmart.com, say, they could be whisked transparently to the Nabisco site on Digital River's server. Wal-Mart would take its cut for the referral. Alternatively, Nabisco could include a gift-finder utility on its home page that would point customers to retail distributors like Wal-Mart. The possible synergies are endless. And what if Nabisco's distributors beat the company at its own game by selling more Nabisco gifts than NabiscoGifts? "That would be fine," Shurts replies. "No problem," he says, all smiles.

To: jbkelle who wrote (3033)	12/14/2000 12:18:53 PM
From: david james	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3198

A few of the Driv clients as posted on Yahoo. Some of these have been announced. Others can be found from doing a search on for example "contracted with Digital River" Intel Dell IBM Hewlett-Packard Nabisco 3M Fujitsu Staples Corel Walmart Honeywell Novell Hasbro K-mart Siemans Sega Adaptec Acclaim Activision Block Financial (i.e., H&R Block) Autodesk Fox Interactive Scansoft Avid Creative Planet Polaris Industries ZDNet Systran Logosoft Aeon Solutions Lotus Intuit Semantec WWOZ-FM - New Orleans 3Com Xerox s3

To: jbkelle who wrote (3033)	12/17/2000 11:16:10 PM
From: david james	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3198

zdnet.com Next came the consolidation of ESD service providers. A recent example is Netsales Inc., an e-commerce company in Overland Park, Kan., which sold off its ESD operation to Digital River. The deal, which took place in August, lets Digital River tap Netsales' customer base. "We've taken their client list and incorporated it into our system," Kerutis says. Scale—as measured by the number of customers and software publishers jumping on one's ESD bandwagon—was a key factor in the Netsales transaction. "In order to be successful in a new industry, you have to have scale," Kerutis observes. "For someone to start a business, it's an uphill climb." Digital River claims to have more than 100,000 digital products in its inventory. As for Netsales, it now will focus on hosting e-commerce storefronts. .... Other ESD players find the advice business a ripe area for expansion. Digital River, for example, is expanding into B2B e-commerce consulting services. The company helps customers develop and launch their e-commerce business models. But perhaps the biggest push among ESD providers is electronic license delivery—in which ownership rights to software are purchased and delivered electronically. ..... Symantec's Seelinger notes that her company's Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security products have done well as ESD titles. She cites the products' smaller footprints and general appeal to customers who spend a lot of time online as factors in that success. "We continue to be big proponents of the ESD delivery model where it's appropriate, given bandwidth and application size," she says. .....It's no wonder. International Data Corp. (IDC) projects that electronic licensing delivery will rake in about $70 billion in revenue worldwide this year, while ESD will fetch about $1 billion. In 2002, electronic license delivery will represent a $140 billion market, while ESD will reach about $5 billion.