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

To: bob zagorin who wrote (2500)	5/21/1998 9:27:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 13797

Bob, I think we've had the "competitive" bias discussion before. You'll have to trust me that I can easily seperate what I do day to day from investing. In fact we used to market Altris based solutions, via Data General. Used to. That is neither here nor there. Unemotionally I look at this company and see nothing but challenges. The existing user base is good for a certain amount of revenue, but not growth and greatness. The glory is all in new sales, market share, new service and support revenue, etc. Convincing existing users not to jump ship is a lot easier than bringing in new ones on board. Document management solutions are a hard enough sale at the best of times - longish sales cycles; educating the buying public; demonstrating ROI; cultural change - a whole host of issues and objections to overcome, and it doesn't help to have the baggage that ALTS has. Yup, they have a nice client list, but most of the players in the industry do as well. Without putting a lot of effort into this, here's what I would do: (I have not read Mr. Erickson's plan) 1. Focus in the areas where they have some strength. Engineering & related industries (people that build and maintain big complex facilities and/or machines - oil & gas; refining; chemical; consulting engineers; etc). This means focussed selling; becoming truly the best and most knowledgeable in this area. 2. They'll need to develop a crack team of implementors that know this business. Partner with other integrators where possible, but I think they'll be a bit on their own for a while. 3. Sell the industry analysts on this plan. Lots of prospects turn blindly to IDC, Meta, Giga, Gartner, Doculabs, etc for opinions on who the leading DM vendors are and in what industries. There's a lot of Altris "who?" out there still. 4. Clean up the financials. Execute. 5. Take a realistic look at EB. Perhaps it should be scrapped, or scaled back as an effort. Must tie into point 1. The earlier they can lever the benefit the better. I think their opportunity to be the "product of the year" is past. Unless they have some pretty interesting plans - there are so many vendors all clamoring for this spot. Chances of success for Altris? Pretty slim at this point. Basically I'm saying do something like Documentum did.