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Technology Stocks : Vantive Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 45bday who wrote (2462)	8/28/1998 8:18:00 AM
From: seth thomas	Respond to of 3033

Thanks for your thoughts. got back last week from Australia and New Zealand - 5 weeks down under. Actually happened to meet some people who do VNTV consulting - who say that VNTV is the strongest company in the CIS market down there. But, it's a relatively small market. It's kind of hard for me to look at VNTV right now and not think it is the bargain of the century. Agreed that there are other bargains, too. Well, I was advised to sell VNTV at 22, and didn't, so that's bad for me. I'm trying to figure out how much is VNTV related, and how much is related to overall stock market. These two things are obviously combining to be a disaster. Re: CSCO - one deal does not a company make. But, it does send a very clear message that SEBL has weaknesses. The reason why companies like CSCO or Sprint don't use pricing as a big decision factor is because saving $500K or even a million is meaningless if you are trying to manage a customer base worth, say $1 billion or $5 billion. If the wrong solution messes up your operation and impacts you say 3%, then you have had a negative impact of $30 or 50 million, and you look pretty dumb for trying to save $500K. However, price cutting at the end of a quarter, once a choice has been made, can give a customer the incentive to move faster (drive paperwork through, for example), in order to get the business in. It does not surprise me that it is difficult to figure out who is in the signing cycle to close a deal. Many, many times in my career a customer contact announces that "Mr. Big" has now decided to get involved at the last minute, or discovers that there is some other person in the loop. I don't think you can always blame the sales rep - there is so much movement and reorganizations in big companies, and often a lack of a well defined procurement process for cross-departmental applications, well - it just happens. On the other hand, sometimes sales reps are indeed plain stupid.