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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Verssen who wrote (12810)	1/13/1999 10:01:00 AM
From: Mark Finger	Respond to of 14631

Here is a message I posted on Yahoo: >>Does Ifmx break down revenue numbers by product and market segment? >>Otherwise how can you tell the split is 75%-20%-5% between OLTP,DW, >>and internet? The numbers are very reasonable and are an indication of why Phil White blew it so badly. He simply tried to move the company to UDS too quickly and the above numbers are confirmation. The market simply is not ready to move that fast (for further confirmation, look at the market numbers for ODIS, VSNT, and Jasmine--if CA would really break them out); those segments in total do not match IFMX license sales. A lot of OLTP is into existing market base and to interested VAR's (especially since IFMX is supposedly easier to administer than Oracle). WalMart continues to buy and install OLTP with every store it opens, and there are a lot of other similar retail stores that IFMX also sells to. The recent US Passport application is fundamentally an OLTP application; they are storing the picture, but I do not see any searching or other real processing of it, which is the real basis of ORDBMS support. As for ORDBMS, consider that Oracle has 4-5 dedicated servers (geospatial support, video, documents, ...) that can provide limited support. Where IFMX will have the advantage is in cases where there are more than one new data type (especially if the data types are different) in the same table, or they need collection support, or the searching on the data types is important (IFMX has better index support on the new data types). Sabre is an example of a company that had these needs. There are a number of other VAR's that have developed applications only for IFMX because of these advantages. These are the beginning, but it takes time to penetrate the market. Getting back to Phil (and associates), I still find it incredible that they misread how slow the market would be to change. They should have had plenty of experience with the slow transition from 5.x (non-threaded) to 7.x sales--it took years before 7.x outsold (on current sales basis) 5.x. Since ORDBMS was even more radical (and would be more likely to have "some" bugs), there should have been no way that he should have expected a fast transition, yet he bet the company (and his job) on that. Sheer stupidity!!!!!!!!!! Incidentally, this is not just hindsight; I published this analysis (on a slow transition) in a newsletter back in 1995 (before UDS was released) that I distributed to a small group of people.