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Technology Stocks : Vantive Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Melissa McAuliffe who wrote (1958)	5/1/1998 11:30:00 AM
From: Notting Hill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3033

sebl sells different modules than vntv. The only rational explanation I could think of on why sebl sell more than vntv is this (before vntv got serious about the SFA market): vntv could only sell the call centre part of their application, which is calculated on the number of concurrent users, using the applications (in other words - bums on seat at probalby $3k per seat for let's say 100 users). While sebl was selling the call centre portion of the deal - for campaign mgmt, consolidation of data, the same as vntv, along with a $3k per salesrep. For an insurance company: it's huge. Thousand of salesreps, along with corp, etc... So probably $5 to $6k for sebl vs $3k for vntv, and different products to sell. No doubt vntv was losing. The other question to ask is: is vntv giving away their sales module, to gain marketshare?

To: Melissa McAuliffe who wrote (1958)	5/2/1998 11:26:00 AM
From: Amsterdam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3033

Melissa, IMO, Sebl's deals are larger because for the last few years they have really been the only industrial strength enterprise SFA product on the market. Therefore it's no surprise that the large enterprise SFA deals have accrued to Sebl. During the same period of time, Vntv has been one of three vendors (Clfy, Scop, Vntv ) with industrial strength, enterprise customer support software. To Vntv's credit they were later to the game than Clfy and Scop but have clearly taken the lead and gotten their fair share of the big deals. Because of this Vntv is, IMO, a more market disciplined company and this toughness should help them going forward. Things are going to start getting very interesting as the two markets merge and the large deals will demand both SFA and CS as a suite of products. Sebl shows his cards that he really wasn't able to develop a competitive CS application internally in the time frame necessary to compete with Vntv, and so buys Scopus. Good that he recognized his weakness and a good move to buy Scop, all things considered. But the integration will not be easy and we won't see a combined single architecture product equal to Vntv for at least a year, probably longer. And they'll have to support the current Scop product for several more years beyond that or risk losing customers and maintenance revenues. Looking out the next 6-12 months there are going to be a number of industrial strength SFA applications on the market that will really challenge Sebl in large SFA deals (for example check out Aurum's new product announcements) so Sebl will have more and more competition on that front. For the deals that require both SFA and CS, VNTV will have a much clearer story to tell as Sebl fumbles with Scop integration issues and Vntv has one clean architecture. Vntv's combined solution should be more competitive than Sebl's in the huge deals for a suite of software, all things considered. Also, once installed, CS is much more difficult to displace than an SFA package.therefore there is little chance of VNTV's customers defecting as long as they deliver a solid SFA application, which they have. VNTV has many huge worldwide customers that they will be able to sell SFA to with a lot more ease than Sebl can do the reverse. Sebl may get some easy SFA deals from the Scop customer base, but they probably would have won a lot of those anyway, and now they have the higher customer expectation of having to deliver seamless integration. There will be some unhappy customers because of that expectation, and the big $$ they've paid for integration. Bottom line, VNTV has a better shot than ever to win the large enterprise deals for a suite of software, and will also harvest their install base with more ease than Sebl. It's a big market and Sebl will do well, but they will have distractions with the Scop merger that could lead to a hiccup in growth or earning. Given Sebl's price relative to Vntv, still long Vntv.