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Technology Stocks : Siebel Systems (SEBL) - strong buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amsterdam who wrote (1319)	3/26/1998 6:06:00 PM
From: Trader Dave	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

CTRA's financials are a mess, but i think they just spun off a slug of the company for around $18 million to a european entity. I know nothing about their products or architecture, but i'd suspect that newer products in the configuration area would be better acquisition targets even if they are smaller companies. I find that fast moving markets with changing usage definitions are very hard to nail down from an architecture/design perspective - the early leaders in a space often stumble for lots of strange reasons. Red brick in data warehousing blew up once oracle realized that you need to do a data warehouse with a separate engine from your oltp database. oops, no more red brick. Configuration has so many different uses and requires lots of complicated integration with legacy systems and new kinds of front ends (the web, crossworlds type stuff, cross route stuff yada yada) I bet it's a tough space to compete in. I bet configuration splits into different products for different uses. The sebl acquisition/partner in this space is less important here, it'll be much less of a challenge to integrate than integrating a mature similar company ala scopus. I think Shege has a lot of information in this space. TD