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

To: R Stevens who wrote (10677)	5/4/1998 1:25:00 AM
From: Robert Graham	Respond to of 14631

One 44K block is IMO insignificant even though I can see where it would appear to be encouraging to some. If this was a 800K block, then it may mean something. Frequent 50K blocks would mean something to me. The funds are not accumulating this stock. But this may change. I see at least two courageous analysis have stepped up to reco this stock. The stock analyst that is thinking IFMX will have trouble competing with Microsoft in the DB market is unable to distinguish the submarkets in the DB business. To then it looks to be monolithic. But then this does not surprise me. Many analysts that report on technology do not understand both the technology and the markets for this sector. I believe that Windows NT IMO has never been seriously considered as a production OS by the marketplace. Windows NT is used on the desktop, or as a departmental server that is downloaded from the enterprise server. Also Microsoft does not have both the infrastructure or even understanding of enterprise level needs to service this market. This is why UNIX will not go away. Furthermore, Windows NT does not run on large platforms which is essential for meeting the workhorse processing needs of larger businesses. I remember running into an experienced data process professional who thought of himself highly and claimed that a large company can be run from applications on Novell networks running from PCs. This was back several years ago when Pentium was just coming out. Fortunately this idea did not hold up to close scrutiny. The company eventually ended up with large HP minicomputers to handle the enterprise computing needs, and have filtered and reformatted information downloaded to department servers which were running the Novell NOS. Then Novell came in with their 30M of bug patches (if I remember correctly) when they changed their NOS to understand "objects". What a mess! Bugs and incomplete functionality is commonplace in the PC world. So I will further say that the PC market in general does not understand the needs of a business at the enterprise level as so professionals that operate on large computer systems in businesses. I see this disparity in the difference in the approach to applications and systems between the minicomputer specialist and your average PC consultant. The concept of an application system to the PC consultant is something like a straightforward one screen data entry module such as hospitals would use for patient information along with a simple one screen scheduler module to set up patient appointments with their doctor. After all, for scheduling capability all you need to do is relate a doctor to an appointment to a meeting time, right? And then display a simple list of current appointments by date and time. Right? I am taking an actual example that once shown to a hospital was actually laughed at during the meeting by the attending hospital staff due to its lack of functionality and data handling capabilities. They were shown a "Mickey Mouse" application on a PC when they were use to dealing with large scale applications on their DEC machines, and being told that the PC application will replace what they are currently using. But the PC consultant saw himself as very good and experienced. Unfortunatley he did not have the right kind of experience in terms of the design and implementation of large systems meeting the substantial needs of a corporation like a hospital. He was only familliar with working of the departmental level. A minicomputer specialist is familliar with creating large application system which from my specific experience involve well over 100 systems and subsystems that is used across department of a business by hundreds of people in the company who all use the collection of applications pretty much at the same time. We are talking a differnt level of use and functionality here, along with a different software architecture in terms of subsystems and interoperability between the subsystems. Different demands are placed on a department level application in comparison to an enterprise wide systems of applications. This scale of this type of enterprise level project is a complete order of magnitude greater than the requirements of your more typical applicaiton used for department specific needs, along with a need for much greater processing capability and reliability of the CPU and its software. Lets not forget about Sun Microsystems first attempt at entering the enterprise level market with their first large minicomputer. That was a total disaster. Talk about very inept handling of the entry of a business into a new market. They did not even realize at the time they needed to be able to provide 24 hoursw a day 7 day a week support that can respond inside of a couple hours. Sun Microsystems found this out only after they started selling their new larger mincomputer systems to the target market. When scaling up a computer, you also need to consider scaling up I/O too, and specifically the I/O demands of your target market. This was another area they were clueless in, and I mean completely clueless. Their machines could not match even 50% of the I/O performance of their competitors counterpart CPU. So many of the businesses they were pursuing with their new CPUs found their machines to be woefully inadequate. I was with one company that was evaluating their new computer systems to replace the Prime computer systems they were using at the time. At the time I saw disbelief with the people who were evaluating and benchmarking the CPUs, which also lead to laughter in the hallways. I would think Microsoft with all of their resources and expert guidance at the Board of Directors level would understand the difference between desktop computing and enterprise level computing. Perhaps they do not? I really think Microsoft is smarter than this. So perhaps they do understand the differences and they curently have no intention of taking over the database market,but perhaps use the product to leverage their efforts that are being made to sell tothe department level? Even if their new person responsible for SQL Server does understsand the enterprice level needs of larger businesses, this would not be enough of a comittment to transform the infrastructure at Microsoft into a company that can support companies on this level. Also, would this be in their best interest to do so? No offense meant to PC consultants. I now develop software on PCs as a consultant. Bob Graham