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

To: investorgal who wrote (10103)	3/30/1998 3:31:00 PM
From: @jim	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14631

>>>"The database with the future built in." Is this really IFMX's new positioning statement. Now I'm worried about my investment! I know they've not been performing all that well in the marketing area....but, this is not the kind of corporate repositioning I was look for. Why can't they do it right? It's just not that difficult. So what if it cost $50K to get it right. This is the kind of tagline I'd expect a junior marcom to come up with. They can't afford to look amateurish in the marketplace. They are playing in the pro league with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM.... This tag may say and imply some of the right stuff and it might even be the right vision, but it's not a good tag, or more correctly, positioning statement. It's too long. It's not memorable. It's too "what we do" oriented rather than customer "benefit" driven. All databases have the future build-in. They are all promising delivery as the foundation of the e-commerce generation. I'm simply very concerned with this tagline direction. It is a very important building block in the market repositioning. It sets the stage of things to come and the approach IFMX will be taking to capture mindshare among very sophisticated buyers in a very hard-ball playing, market environment. JPD By the way, I'm not new to this post. I'm an IFMX long. And have spent the last 15 years in high tech advertising and marketing.

To: investorgal who wrote (10103)	3/30/1998 6:23:00 PM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

>>I believe your IUS numbers for 1997 are extremely optimistic given >>the only datablade that was production ready (by IFMX's own >>statements) was the text datablade. Most of the base datablades were >>not comercially available for purchase until 1998. They were >>available in early release programs only. Maybe you and I are >>talking to different people, but I don't see a tremendous amount of >>IUS business being done. It's the tried and true DSA/ODS/IDS (pick >>an acronym) engine that is helping to bring IFMX back. First, I am basing the number on the 1000 sites of IUS reported in a December PR, and assuming an average of slightly more than 10 users per site (IFMX generally requires a minimum of 5 users in the license purchase). This gives the low end number for 1997. I also have problems with your statement that the only DataBlades available was the text one. First, IFMX had several that had been part of the Illustra DBMS and converted (spatial, Web, ...). Second, a number of the recent press releases were "deployment" releases rather than initial purchase releases. For example, the GTE Bastille, Sabre Technologies and I think Egghead. In particular, the GTE application used several significant objects. These are companies that I really would have problems seeing a release on buggy versions. Finally, the key to a lot of last year's sales was the fact that people were buying to get the jump on the competition, and they knew what they were buying. Just remember what the competition was (and still is). IBM failed to put together a "developer's kit" for creating extensions (I think they finally did it, but we are talking a lot of delay). Sybase did not start shipping anything to work with until late in 1997. Oracle still does not have anything but pre-packaged solutions. Yes, IUS was horribly buggy in the new areas during the early parts of 1997, with some key parts either unimplemented or barely implemented. However, what were the alternatives. The 1000 sites were buying for the future and the future is now. Watch the companies mentioned above and some of the others. They will be providing the success stories this year that should start the stampede during the next two years. I agree that OLTP/Data Warehousing carried the sales during 1997. The numbers I give for IUS would only be around 10% of total license sales, and even my number for 1999 probably would only be around 30% of total license sales.