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Technology Stocks : Enterprise Informatics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elliot Puritz who wrote (2351)	4/6/1998 5:45:00 PM
From: jackhach	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13797

You did answer your own question. The cost is in the near guarantee of acquiring these customers and either supporting/enhancing existing technology (with EB or without...)or replacing/upselling these captured sites. The list is quite distinguished, and pretty diversified I might add. In addition you (the buyer) raise your general/overall company exposure, learn/add new technology, possibly acquire better/more useful technolgy, and you need not have to wait very long for all this to occur. The R&D is code driven -- fixes are usually just a matter of manpower/resources. The cost and time to pursue and not-likely land these life-sized clients would be huge. I reiterate that once an application is in place -- it is usually very, very, difficult to replace. Customers overwhelmingly want continuity and seamless upgrades/enhancements to what exist. An acquirer (of ALTS) can come in and basically claim to be ALTS by virtue of owning ALTS present/"any" future applications. It is more often the case then not, that a company will balk/delay any actions until a new application(s)can come along and replace seamlessly (or close enough)with what is being used. I've found that most of the publicly held companies that have an established client list are reasonably safe in terms of ultimate valuation. ALTS, in this respect, has a chance. When I worked at Lotus -- selling/upselling to existing customers was somewhat easy. Establishing new (cool/cold)customers was far more difficult -- especially where an existing e-wide solution was already in place. Even where the MS people would consider a new/replaced solution, the finance people would often kill the deal. Maitanance and upgrades are where the long-term/certain dough is made in software & operating systems.