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To: Judith Williams who wrote (38102)	1/17/2001 9:22:26 PM
From: Judith Williams	Respond to of 54805

Methinks Oracle was anticipating i2's conference call: upside.com "The first wave of b-to-b was about companies savings millions of dollars by using online marketplaces to purchase indirect goods," says Sandy Sanderson, Oracle's executive vice president in charge of its b-to-b strategy. "But the real value of b-to-b will come when companies save billions of dollars by collaborating with suppliers across their entire supply chain, not just through procurement," he adds. Sanjiv et al obviously have a bias, but they stressed in the cc that Oracle's products don't work across companies without re-architecting. Anyone have any insights on this? --Judith

To: Judith Williams who wrote (38102)	1/18/2001 3:56:52 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Excellent CC notes, Judith. Thank you for taking the time and effort to listen to the CC and take notes to share with the group. It might be a nice exercise for each of the companies listed on the G&K index and W&W index for the group to follow along with each CC over the quarters as they roll by. I'm going to dig through the Intel report and will post some of the numbers here. Regardless of the economic conditions, the quarters do roll by. Year after year after year.... As I mentioned, I was busy listening to the Redback Networks CC in the next generation networks category. If anyone is interested, I posted those notes here: Message 15199028 In i2's Q3 CC, management indicated they were being careful not to grow 'too fast' by taking on too many deals because they wouldn't be able to handle all of the implementations and service. Before I sit down for the replay of the CC, I was curious if they mentioned anything about that 'controlled growth' during last night's call. I noticed that ASP's went up from $1.7 M in Q3 to $1.9 M in Q4. The balance sheet has been improving throughout fiscal 2000. One of the ratios we follow at The Motley Fool is called the Foolish Flow Ratio which is a good indicator of balance sheet management - especially in times of rapid growth such as i2 has been experiencing. The flow ratio has maintained a good level in the last 4 quarters in the .78 to .89 range (anything below 1 is considered 'tip top ship shape'). Cash to debt ratio has improved throughout the year which indicates they have no need to borrow to expand growth. The Q1 cash to debt ratio was 1.82 and the Q4 cash to debt ratio was 2.35. This is understandable as the cash and investments have increased to throughout the year to $820 Million. Operating margins improved to 17% for the quarter and to 14% for full year fiscal 2000. This is up from 8% for fiscal 1999. Management's guidance in Q1, Q2 and Q3 had been for continued improvement in expanding the operating margin for fiscal 2000 and fiscal 2001. As you indicated, management once again guided that they stand by the quarterly 2% expansion in operating margin. They also seemed to be consistent in their guidance about growth and not seeing a slow down in the specific target market of IT that they address. Gross margin remains in the typical software vicinity of being up there at 74%. It was 73% in Q3. Overall, gross margin was lower - as you mentioned - due to the fees paid to IBM. IBM had a pretty decent quarter, by the way. The hiring in Q4 was consistent with their guidance back in Q3, so no surprises there. Here are my notes from Q3 in case anybody wants to review them: fireboards.fool.com Thanks again for taking the notes and sharing them with all of us. It's the type of group effort that helps all of us understand our investments a little better. Tuning in to hear management of our investments gives a nice snapshot to retail investors and the Internet has made it so easy to do. Thanks again, Judith. BB

To: Judith Williams who wrote (38102)	1/18/2001 11:07:18 AM
From: StockHawk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Judith, nice summary of I2's confrence call. Just to clarify one issue: Revenues: milestone, crossed $1billion mark, up 115% sequentially In general people look at revenue changes on a quarterly basis in two ways, year over year and sequentially. In the case of I2 quarterly revenues increased 115% on a YoY basis. Sequentially the quarterly revenues increased 15%. When talking about annual revenues, as you are, YoY and sequentially is the same thing, but people rarely use the term sequentially when referring to annual numbers. I just wanted to point this out, because if a casual reader see 115% sequential growth they might immediately think about quarterly performance, which would be absolutely incredible, and that is, of course, not the case. StockHawk