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Technology Stocks : Merant - MRNT (formerly MIFGY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fyi who wrote (245)	11/9/1998 8:02:00 PM
From: fyi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 461

Agree with all you say, but my belief is that you are understating the merits here. MIFGY's traditional Cobol tool's business has pretty much established the franchise in mainframe Cobol shops, as you indicate. That franchise alone is worth more than the $5 spread between MIFGY's current stock price and the cash pershare it has in the bank. After all, there is probably a bigger inventory of Cobol code in corporate America than all the other languages combined !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! From there, MIFGY is now taking its Cobol franchise out into the distributed world. From what I have heard, the company's new NetExpress is a neat product with oodles of promise. The beauty of this product is that it takes Cobol into the latest rage, component-based application development. That gives the legion of Cobol programmers the opportunity to move their skill set into the distributed world where they can work in step with the latest application development trends. That reality could very well act to reinvigorate (?spelling) the use of Cobol for building new applications. MIFGY is sponsoring a seminar series with the Gartner Group and Computerworld on Net Express (see page 75 of the 11/2 issue of Computerworld). With the acquisition of the Intersolv products, MIFGY gains a portfolio of products squarely targeted at serving the distributed application developers. Here, PVCS has become the standard source control management system standardized on by tools of all shapes and sizes. Oddly enough, there is even some talk of IBM wanting PVCS migrated to the mainframe in recognition of PVCS's extremely strong position in this $1 billion plus marketplace. Just about every distributed application program needs data access middleware. Here, Data Direct has established the dominant OEM franchise. Plenty off opportunity here as the data access middleware evolves to serve increasing customer need. My point is that Microsoft's strong mainframe position is rapidly being expaned into the distributed world through its product development along with the equally excellent software products it acquired with Intersolv.