Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : OBJECT DESIGN Inc.: Bargain of the year!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2512)	11/5/1998 3:59:00 PM
From: Punko	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3194

But this acquisition (of VSNT) will boost ODIS' stockprice as only one ODBMS-only vendor will remain on the stockmarket. I don't think I'd be as optimistic. First, I'd ask why the buyer passed on ODI. If ODI is so much better technologically, which although arguable, most of us seem to believe, and since ODI is fairly valued at current levels (which I believe, anyway), it would seem to me that ODI would be the logical choice -- not Versant. Next, I'd be concerned about the intentions of the buyer. What would their end game be? How effectively would they use their cash reserves to boost VSNT's r&d and marketing activities? How effectively would they leverage their installed base? If CA were the buyer (highly doubtful) or a company like it, that would in essence eliminate Vsnt as a viable competitor to ODI the same way CA's purchase of Ingres nailed Ingres's coffin shut for Oracle. CA is, of course, where software goes to die. If the buyer were Microsoft or Oracle, on the other hand, I'd struggle to see how this would be beneficial to ODI.

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2512)	11/6/1998 7:13:00 AM
From: hasbeen101	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3194

Versant's object-level caching allows us to retain only the set of objects used by an application, without the artificial overhead imposed by page-based approaches,'' said Benjamin Treynor, Vice President of Database Technology at Versant. ''The technology covered in the patent takes advantage of Versant's object-level caching to selectively retain those objects most likely to be reused by the application, resulting in a dramatic decrease in cache misses. In a latency-dominated computing environment, this offers substantial performance improvements when compared to traditional LRU-, CLOCK-, or frequency-based approaches.'' (From the Versant press release) Just in case some of the non-techies don't see what this is all about, all the bitchy stuff about "page-based approaches" is a dig at ObjectStore. Moving on to my interpretation, ODIS has long held a patent on how their caching works, and as those of us who use ObjectStore know, it works incredibly well. Even if Versant offered some credible benchmark showing that their product worked better in a diverse range of plausible real-world scenarios (which I don't think they can or will), ObjectStore is so good anyhow that any improvement would not be terribly significant to customers. Finally, no wonder Versant is going downhill if they are only interested in sniping at ODIS. What a waste of time. The name of the game is to increase the ODBMS market 100-fold, not to fight against the exitsing players.