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Technology Stocks : RATIONAL SOFTWARE- BUY OR HOLD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas Haegin who wrote (2745)	12/21/1998 6:29:00 AM
From: Thomas Haegin	Respond to of 3115

Good read from The Motley Fool Board: from: SoftwareGuy Number: 180 of 184 >>From all that I've talked with, there and in external circles, there are much better products on the market, and often at much more reasonable prices - Perforce, Razor, Advanced SW Technologies, Cayenne, Insure++, etc Just wanted to reply on the quality of Rational's tools. I have consulted at a lot of very large projects in the financial and telecomms industries in the US and Europe. In my experience, Rational's OO modelling tools beat the other offerings I have seen hands down. Case in point (pun intended), at my current contract at a very large telecomm, we are officially supposed to use Cayenne's tools. I have rarely met as many professional OO modellers as at this project, and never met as many published and famous ones. They are all using Rational on their personal pc's and transferring it to Cayenne, because Rational is more powerful and easier to use. We will be switching company wide to Rational this year, as a result of pressure from our modellers and developers (plus Cayenne's tools are awful). I know Rational's test suite is considered inferior to Merc's (not being involved in testing, I can't compare), but for their other tools, particularly OO modelling, I believe they are the leaders from the points of view of technical superiority, ease of use, and management buy-in. Another indicator - if you look at job/contract offers, you will see that employers are looking for Rational software skills much much more than they are looking for any other OO case tool vendor. I think this is one case in which management and techies are in synch, in preferring the same vendor for OO case tools -eom

To: Thomas Haegin who wrote (2745)	12/21/1998 6:38:00 AM
From: Thomas Haegin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3115

Another one from TMF: I thought LMT was a RATL customer shadow59 Number: 183 of 184 Rational's competitors mentioned previously, like Razor (Tower Concepts), TrueChange (True Software), etc., have many appealing qualities, including some great technical innovations, but the fact remains that they are 30-100 person companies. The big sales are into large development organizations where Rational's sales force can dominate a sales situation. When you pay sales people to drive a $3000 per licence sale, you've got a big advantage of a company that distributes its product over the web at $500 per seat. These products are like old English cars - interesting engineering and a good value, but not ones most companies will bet the future of their software development on. Having said that, Lockheed Martin selected Razor at its tool of choice, and Merck is using True, or so I hear. Rational is the Ferrari of the business. Everyone would like to have one. It's expensive, and you need a full time mechanic. On the track, though, it'll blow most everything else away. PVCS (Intersolv, now part of Microfocus) mirrors the Rational product line, but with a Chevrolet market position. You can buy PVCS at CompUSA. CA Endevor (Computer Associates) holds a strong postion in the IBM mainframe market. BTW, I sold my Rational at 22, having paid 13 -eom