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Technology Stocks : INPR - Inprise to Borland (BORL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Aspect who wrote (583)	7/22/1998 10:09:00 PM
From: David Miller	Respond to of 5102

Question about Visigenic You asked an interesting question, I am surprised no-one picked up on it, especially as Del made a point of Visi's contribution in his analysis of the quarter. Visigenic licence revenues for the 6/97 quarter were $4.35m. They were selling Visichannel products as well as Visibroker at that time, and I can't find a breakdown anywhere, so we can only guess the Visibroker contribution - but it would have been around $3m. So if sales of Visibroker increased 58% (per the press release) that is still only $4.5m - let's be generous and call it $5m. This is still less than a third of Iona's revenue from Orbix. More interesting again is the continuing decline of the ex-Borland part of the company - if the $5m Visibroker figure is right, then only $36m accrued last quarter from the licensing of Delphi, C++ etc. That is actually an 8% decrease from the same quarter last year. To go back to your question, the main difference between Visigenic and Iona - at least in their early days - was that Visi concentrated on the OEM market, and were very successful there. They began to lose money investing in the change to their business model to address the enterprise market, which is where Iona had concentrated their attention. It wasn't a product thing, it wasn't a people thing, it was a marketing thing. david

To: Aspect who wrote (583)	7/22/1998 11:59:00 PM
From: Kashish King	Respond to of 5102

Iona is strictly middleware whereas Inprise offers more of a turnkey development environment. I haven't heard that Iona's product is more powerful or more reliable than Inprise's and I doubt that's the case. Iona commands a higher multiple than Inprise because they don't have Inprise's historical baggage, because they have a working relationship with Microsoft and because you don't spit on people when saying Iona in the possesive form. What would have happened had Sun, IBM or Oracle purchased Netscape early on and spammed the country with the Navigator product a la AOL? I guess they realized the value of eyeballs too late. With that in mind, Del should be PRESSING Oracle and IBM for direct assistance in developing their Java- and CORBA-centric products. Barring that Del could give Bill Gates a call and ask for directions on how to get to the same pile of cash Iona "stumbled" over.