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Microcap & Penny Stocks : TSIS: WHAT IS GOING ON? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bgavlick who wrote (446)	12/4/1997 10:29:00 PM
From: Due Diligence	Respond to of 6931

One word. AT&T.<g> Jimbo

To: bgavlick who wrote (446)	12/4/1997 10:57:00 PM
From: froland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6931

bgavlick: Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with you that TSIS has no recognizable competition and that's why I'm so interested. However, as I mentioned in my previous post, profits (above normal profits that is) attract competition. If TSIS starts posting above normal profit margins other telecom companies are going to become interested. Every big company uses either a PBX or CENTREX for its telephone service. The top four PBX vendors are in order of market share: Lucent, Nortel, Siemens and NEC. Margins are thin, competition is fierce. Their products are viewed as commodities with little difference between vendors offerings. Those companies are constantly trying to figure some way of differentiating their products in order to avoid the ravages of price competition. What TSIS has is essentially an automated call center. Rather than calling in and talking to an agent, you call into the call center and listen to a recording(s). A live agent has been replaced by a recording. To me, the only technical challenge for a PBX/ACD vendor is getting investor data from a database and converting it into a recorded announcement for on demand playback. What I'm getting at is that the Lucent facility using TSIS is also going to have some big Definity G3 PBXs which handle some part of the investor relation calls! Those Definity product managers are probably closely scrutinizing the TSIS service with an eye towards doing it themselves. I think it would be much easier for a PBC/ACD vendor to sell one of its existing customers a new PBX/ACD feature rather than TSIS to sell the same customer a whole new service. Which brings up the issue of switching costs. What would the costs be for Lucent to switch from TSIS to Lucents PBX/ACD offering say two years from now if Lucents PBX/ACD investor relation service is priced competitively? I haven't seen anything to suggest the costs would be high. As always comments, opinions and insights are welcome. froland.