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Microcap & Penny Stocks : CCEE Breaking Out -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rob Taylor who wrote (9371)	3/3/1998 3:36:00 PM
From: Steven R. Bergman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12454

Rob, You've alluded to a few issues that I feel warrant greater airing. First of all, this is not a vendor-independent product, meaning by vendor one's long distance company. Thus, if you as a company choose Sprint, you get your choice of (one or two of) Sprint's proprietary long distance billing products. If you choose AT&T, ditto. Therefore, one cannot choose db Express independently of the offering long distance company. And, normally, a company selects their long distance supplier because of a combination of price, facilities, and service; while billing may be important, it normally does not drive the decision. However, since MCI has announced $.09/minute rates for residences that sign up via the Internet because Internet sign-ups cost MCI less (is the initial justification) and AT&T has said it will remain competitive, and since businesses bill more than residences, there should be a bright future for a company with a solid billing and analysis package that will be accessible over the Internet. This will especially be true for companies trying to make a dent in the LD market and companies like the baby bells that are trying to gain approval to do so. Nevertheless, the fact remains that these are large companies that will want to deal with reputable suppliers. Many of the comments on this thread regarding the reputation of CCEE management are extremely relevant in this context. The second point I want to make concerns the self-interest of the professional telecom/IT manager versus the self-interest of a telephone carrier. The trend in carriers is toward being the sole source of service: local, LD, cellular, Internet, Intergalactic calling, Intravenous communications, whatever. Their paean now is: One Bill for All. This is appealing to the smaller, relatively unsophisticated company and of course is very beneficial to the comprehensive supplying carrier. It is also unacceptable to any truly professional IT or telecom manager to put all their eggs in one basket. If a company signs up with AT&T (for instance) and AT&T has a fibre optic cable break (or their switch goes down) in that city, what alternatives does a company have? If that company has T1 service from AT&T and dial-up long distance service from Sprint, that company will be able to reroute their calls easily over local trunks. However, if that company also uses (as will be possible one day) AT&T as their supplier of local trunks as well and AT&T is out of service (again, I'm using AT&T only as an example; in most parts of the country AT&T has the most robust network), what is that company going to do? Professional managers not only have the best plan A, but they also have Plan B when Plan A ceases to function. Picking an all-in-one carrier ultimately means not having plan B. Similarly, by using two suppliers, not necessarily in equal proportion, a professional IT/telecom manager sends out signals that neither carrier's position is secure and that either is subject to change, and not necessarily for the better. Why would a professional manager want to give up that leverage? The foregoing means that the billing package from carrier A will not reflect the calls made via carrier B's facilities and vice versa. Each carrier will use that rationale to attempt to garner 100% of the company's business. The smart IT/telecom manager instead will look to capture all of the incoming and outgoing traffic on software that is housed on the company's computers, reducing costs still further and making the company even more independent of its carrier-suppliers. Such software also identifies the internal party making or receiving a call, something that CCEE has said it can do, but which it has not yet meaningfully demonstrated or proven works as advertised in the domestic (U.S.) market, at least not to my knowledge. CCEE originally promised a pre-Internet version that rans on a company's PC rather than on a carrier's server, but has not mentioned it publicly in at least a year. Based on my early conversations with staff there, the company had no feel for this market nor its distribution opportunities and roadblocks. That version would have been client-side only, and would not have merged carrier data with customer data, the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps it's just as well, then, that they didn't pursue that product at that time, but the multi-carrier issue and the potential product line gap remain untreated. Steve