READ THIS: TAVA, Hanifen 2/12/1998 article; photo of John Jenkins
westword.com
"The frustration is that here we are, one month into 1998, and
most people still don't get it," he says. "We have to start most
conversations by beating people into submission on the point that
there is a real problem."
Jenkins understands what his clients are up against. Many have
downsized their plant engineering staffs, and the survivors must
cope with the "real-time world" of a round-the-clock processing
plant. "If something's broken, you've got an hour to fix it, so
someone will go in and write a crude patch program that stays
there twenty years," Jenkins notes. "And every time you change
your control system, you have a big risk of plant shutdown. So
there's a natural reluctance: If it's still putting out product, don't
mess with it."
"All that we're doing in Y2K enhances our base business," he
says. "The opportunity for us downstream is to end this Y2K
event with a strongly expanded client base on a corporate-wide
basis."
The fix is in: John
Jenkins of TAVA
Technologies expects
continued growth of
his company's
Y2K-related business.
_____
westword.com
he clock is ticking:
Russell Welty
(center) with Lance
Marx (left) and Barry
Ollman are three of
the Year 2000
evangelists at
Hanifen Imhoff.
...
'Even within the programming community itself, some skeptics
view the issue as so much hype, a cynical ploy to scare
computer users into scrapping their software for all-new
versions. The Y2K glitch "is not a huge problem of computer
software, nor a unique problem, nor a difficult problem to solve,
but it is the focus of a huge and unique racket," declares
software consultant Nicholas Zvegintov in an article in
American Programmer. "Solving the Year 2000 problem is an
exercise for the software novice."
But Welty and other financial analysts disagree. If it's so simple,
they say, why are major corporations and government agencies
shelling out millions of dollars and countless employee hours to
address the problem? US West plans to spend around $50 million
on its Y2K fix; the State of Colorado, $40 million. The Social
Security Administration, which has been working on the issue
since 1989 and is wrestling with more than 30 million lines of
code, figures it will cost at least $30 million to keep the benefit
checks coming past the century mark.
"We're not trying to create a scare, but the more you dig into it,
the more the possibilities open up," Welty says. "What happens if
the supply chain is knocked down for a week or two? We've all
become dependent on immediate delivery, and there were
companies that went out of business during the UPS strike."
"Two years ago, when we
first started telling money
managers about this, we had a
lot of people laughing at us,"
adds Barry Ollman, a Welty
colleague at Hanifen Imhoff
who deals primarily with
institutional investors. "It
sounded like this curious,
faddish thing. People thought
we were just nuts. But as the
evidence came in, we've been more than vindicated."
In fact, the strongest evidence of the seriousness of the Y2K
threat may be the emergence of a booming market for
technology companies that offer the critical tools and services
necessary to fix the problem. Some of the operations are clearly
flashes in the pan -- what Welty describes as "Two Guys
Millennium Service" operating out of someone's garage -- but
others are solidly positioned to reap staggering revenues from
the crisis. While corporate America is literally getting its clock
cleaned, these companies -- including several key players in
Colorado that were all but unknown two years ago -- are
displaying growth curves that resemble the slopes of Annapurna.
"If we'd gone out to create a problem to stimulate our business,
we couldn't have created a better problem than Y2K," says Tim
Fitzpatrick, vice president of sales for Accelr8 Technology
Corporation, a Denver company that's seen its earnings
skyrocket over the past year and a half, largely on the strength
of its Y2K software tools. "Yes, there is a lot of hype out there,
but there is a real problem, too."
The Y2K evangelists at Hanifen Imhoff have seized on the
phenomenon as a golden opportunity for investors; Welty and
assistant Lance Marx issue a monthly newsletter charting the
growth of Y2K-related stocks and tracking what banks, major
corporations and governments are doing to fix the problem.
They're hardly alone in such efforts, yet most high-powered
investment firms have been slow to jump on the bandwagon. In
many quarters, the dreaded Millennium Bug is still regarded as
an affliction to be dealt with in private, like a nasty skin disease.
Welty sees the tide turning, though, thanks in part to new,
tougher Securities and Exchange Commission rules requiring
publicly traded companies to provide more detailed disclosure of
how they're coping with their computer nightmare.
"Most companies don't want their name publicly associated with
the problem," Welty notes. "They're not even letting their [Y2K]
vendors announce the contracts. But that's beginning to change.
Instead of people hiding that they have a problem, it's going to
become a benefit to say that you've hired somebody to fix this."
.... |
