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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: syborg who wrote (10045)	3/25/1998 3:43:00 AM
From: Robert Graham	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14631

Am I the only one that is beginning to think this company has not placed a priority on marketing? I may be a bit premature here based on what has been posted so far, but they still do not have their VP of Marketing filled yet,do they? Does Informix have their sales positions filled? Going out after key sale wins to boost confidence in the company and add a few dollars to the current quarter's ballance sheet is one thing. But I think Informix needs a more comprehensive and combined approach to their sales and marketing in order to survive in the long run. For that matter, the big sales wins we have been hearing about may not show a total payoff in the current quarter which has been previously discussed on this thread. I find that engineers tend to view the marketing and sales part of the company at best a necissary evil. Here we have a hardware engineer running a company of software engineers that apparently is drawing on his other hardware experienced management buddies to fill high-level positions in this company. However, it is the sales and marketing driven companies that make the money like Oracle has proven. DEC was a good example of this type of company driven by the engineering part of the company instead of marketing and sales departments. At one time DEC apparently thought that their products would sell themselves. When they sold to other engineers, this was true. But when they attempted to move into general business use of their minicomputer systems, they fell flat on their face because they did not know how to operate in that type of sales environment. Informix apparently has not placed a priority on marketing which is a concern of mine. Doesn't sales and marketing need to go hand-in-hand at a company in a competative marketplace? I would think this is particularly true with the direction Bob F decided to go in pursuing the more lucrative sales of higher-end type of database systems with $1500 per head price tags. Yes, I know there are discounts. But when you have a product priced at this level, discounts would come at quantities, or in other words sales to large accounts. I know of companies that would not consider an Informix solution due to this price tag. So more agressive marketing (and sales) would be a more necissary part of the company's success with this high-end product approach to the market. Lets see...at a book distributor I worked for in the past, there were 500 employees. So lets say 300 that need to access databases. 300 * 1,500 is $450,000 just for the database software not including anything else they need to run their database applications. I know more than one CEO that would balk at this price. IMO even a price tag of $300,000 to $350,000 would be considered high by this size of business. This is equivalent to a base price of a higher end minicomputer system, not including the layered software, which is the type of minicomputer they would purchase for their needs. Then you add 300 PCs, there is another $450,000 that was spent not including applicaiton software and the cost of setup and support on the network and replacement costs a couple years down the road. The costs add up particularly with PC based compared with terminal based systems. Any thoguhts? As a side note, I want to highlite here that downsizing costs can come with a pretty hefty price tag, both initial outlay and ongoing costs, both in hardware, software, and regular personnel. The long term advantage is better and more flexible access to data by the end user, not necissarily the savings in costs. This is at odds with the way consulting firms sell downsizing as being cost saving and requiring less personnel to manage the comapny's future data processing needs. Bob Graham