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

To: Punko who wrote (2515)	11/5/1998 10:10:00 PM
From: Erez	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3194

Well, If the buyer had a slight chance of getting ODIS for the price of VSNT, I am sure he/she would of jumped on it. ODI would be undoubtedly a much more expensive purchase. Besides, I don't believe ODI is for sale altogether. Just came back from the conference in Boston. I know that people always come home "PUMPED UP" from conferences such as the one I just attended. I truly believe this company is on the right track. We had a chance to sneak preview 2 new upcoming releases. 1) Object Store 6.0 -- Better performance, higher concurrency and better thread management altogether bringing an already superb product (Objectstore 5.0) to higher grounds. 2) The second new product I was introduced to is completely driven towards the emerging XML era. This product is particularly exciting since it combines the ease of XML syntax with the power of Objectstore. The new XML product is designed in such a way that the end user doesn't have to know anything about the underlying Objectstore API. Essentially, if the user knows XML, he /she can use the product with confidence. I certainly expect to see the new XML server becomes ubiquitous as no other ODI product has been. People in the conference could feel the excitement in the air. It is my belief that ODI is on the verge of a significant breakthrough. Only time will tell :))) Regards, Erez

To: Punko who wrote (2515)	11/6/1998 4:19:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 3194

ODIS's fair valuation is $10-$11/share. Just look at Open Market Inc., your so-called wild guess on e-commerce: decreasing revenue (actually lower Q3 rev than ODIS's), huge and increasing losses, all in all leading OMKT to lay off 65 people... but then look at its stockprice: the market completely erased the drop from $8 to $5 which happened a couple of weeks ago. And OMKT's currently enjoying a market cap twice as big as ODIS's (ie $270M vs. $130M). Further, when looking at the big picture, we can see that ODIS's still the fastest growing (or-)dbms company: IBM Corp's Janet Perna is boasting their DB2 because its license revenue grew by 14% y/y!!!! And she claims that such a ridicule growth rate is much better than their competitors's...... Talking of M&A matters re: ODIS and VSNT, I really don't think that CA will join this party. A few years ago, CA went through sort of a thorough analysis of the DBMS market: after half a year of assessing RDBMS against ORDBMS against ODBMS, they decided that the latter option made more sense. Consequently CA found it easier/cheaper to sub-contract Jasmine from Fujitsu/TCI. Then they launched a mailing campaign aimed at 29,000 prospects. Therefore, I don't think that CEO Wang is stupid enough to get back to these 29,000 prospects just to tell them: Forget about Jasmine, t'was only a probe stuff... actually, newly acquired Versant's much better.... until we close a deal with POET! CA will stick to its Jasmine/Jade product line. Microsoft buying out VSNT? Non sense! Why MSFT would re-invent the wheel? Unless it's a pretty cheap/straightfoward wheel to re-invent (like a web-browser) MSFT'd better open its $17B worth wallet. MSFT has already allocated a lot of resources partnering with ODIS (they even participated in this week's Object Exchange '98 event). I think that MSFT's strategy is to seduce Goldman and ODIS' other key people. Money is not an issue for MSFT: the company's likely to put up to $800M on the table for ODIS --actually no cash is needed for such a deal: remember MSFT acquiring Hotmail for $450M in (MSFT) stock. And don't tell me that MSFT's frozen as far as M&A biz is concerned! Yesterday MSFT announced its acquisition of an e-advertising firm for $850M(?). The current anti-trust trial will not prevent MSFT of acquiring a small-cap ''struggling'' in the dbms arena... Hey! ORCL's gonna scream against MSFT because it gobbled an $80M/year company??? That's about Larry Ellison's annual compensation!! The second most likely candidate is, IMO, Sun Microsystems: ODIS's already developed a 100%-pure-Java-stamped ODBMS and it will be good for SUNW to offer its own data-repository along with its hardware and other software products. It will further give SUNW a stronger leverage on the way Java will be handled, especially in this emerging embedded software market. Sybase's former CEO Kertzman put it: the dbms landscape of the next century will be totally different from the ''triumvirat'' of the last 20 years. There won't be such a thing as a database-only softwarehouse: DBMS developers will have to re-invent themselves by tying their offerings to ERP softwares, internet apps, embedded devices, and so on.