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Technology Stocks : Clarify - upside to EPS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: seth thomas who wrote (752)	6/5/1998 6:52:00 PM
From: Trader Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1062

Welcome back married man!!! or are you sneaking laptop usage? This warrants more discussion, but I'll tell you there is broad based concern about vantive's relatively mediocre domestic license growth. I know about all of the allocation choices, especially at Oracle. Vantive's growth has been modestly better than Clarify's and much better than scopus' but Vantive's aggressive parading of being a complete competitor to SEBL invites a direct comparison to SEBL. (Your response sounds a little defensive.) I happen to think that the CIS market has a VERY different market dynamic than SFA. The CIS space is more competitive, the application is much more mission critical and the deals start smaller and build more slowly. This means that Vantive's growth should be slower than SEBL's, since sebl is able to sell tens of thousands of seats all at once. However, the investment community needs to look at things very simply. if you have 150 stocks in your portfolio you need very simple metrics to measure and you can only spend minutes analyzing a potential investment. (I think this is sloppy, but it's the lack of focus and short term thinking that creates opportunity.) The street considers this one small space and doesn't consider the distinction between cis and sfa relevant, this leads to the concern about vantive's growth. That hasn't been helped by vantive's aggressiveness in claiming triumph over Tom. Now that we have sebl/scop and vantive has an sfa offering, we'll get more direct comparisons for the two companies, but near term vantive is starting from a disadvantage since they're starting from the slower growth rate. I think vantive and clarify might be able to capitalize on the sebl/scop integration challenges, but we'll have to wait for september and december to see what happens. Vantive and Sebl have higher valuations -- MUCH MUCH higher. But if either one of them disappoints, they'll manugisitisize. At 2x revenues, there's not enormous downside risk in clfy stock and if they start executing (and some of that evidence is bubbling around) there's much more upside than in vantive or sebl. congrats steve, hope the honeymoon was (is) fun. TD