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Technology Stocks : Information Architects (IARC): E-Commerce & EIP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SOROS who wrote (3129)	10/31/1997 1:14:00 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10786

Soros, right now the body shops are in the limelight, and, judging by their stellar earnings, deservedly so. But, I think it safe to say that, whether empirically or intuitively, we all know that the automated tool vendors stand the best chance of getting the biggest piece of the Y2K pie. The only question is "when". Companies have been outsourcing their code to body shops for years and fixing Y2K stuff is about as straight-forward a programming job as there is. In other words, body shops are a known commodity. Not so for Y2K tool vendors; they still have to prove themselves. That's why contract size for tool vendors -- when they actually land one -- are only for a million or two lines. The prevailing wisdom is: if you do a good job on what we give you, there's plenty more where that came from. When you think about it, ALYD has been remarkably candid in admitting they are learning on the job, and have opened themselves up for a lot of criticism in the process. But, now that earnings are being announced for other Y2K tool vendors, it becomes clear that ALYD truly is way ahead of the curve in its peer group. The important point to note is that despite the problems ALYD has had securing code from clients, when it comes time to fix it, they get it done quick and they get it done right. So much so that Aer Lingus even presented a paper on ALYD at a conference. So, while I may be in a quandry over ALYD's stock price (that's a whole other post I've been trying my best for days to write), I certainly have no doubt that they will some day soon be leading the Y2K pack. You hit the nail on the head when you said "real contracts, real income, real potential". - Jeff