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Technology Stocks : i2 Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shane M who wrote (1209)	3/9/1999 9:20:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2339

I've also been sniffing around MANU lately, wondering if now might be a good time to pick some up. Gorilla game aside, MANU right now is priced at 1x sales, which is pretty low given the sectors prospects. Is Manugistics really in that bad a shape? It seems that the market growth focus in AMR's report would favor MANU's implementations over i2 (retail)? Still long i2, but wondering if there isn't value in MANU right now.

To: Shane M who wrote (1209)	3/10/1999 3:19:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2339

Shane, I2 and Manu are still my favorite stocks because this is my favorite industry. Unfortunately they are not my favorite investments! I'm going to leave those tickers on there forever no matter what happens, fwiw. Go down with the ship, you know. The only thing wrong with I2 is Sap and Psft. Otherwise they are a good company and I would invest in them. Sebl is a good investment and from a product standpoint is about as strong as I2 in product and space but the difference is Sebl doesn't have a couple starving large companies with weak offerings in their space ready to give product away if need be. Manu management can't operate in this environment and I2 can. I don't know how much you have in I2... why not diversify a little into Sebl... or as a hedge short Sap? I am sure Sap is going down and Sebl is going up. I2 is more of an unknown and as you know it isn't cheap. I dont think any of the problems we are seeing in software are due to Y2K!!! If Y2K is a factor, it is maybe 20% of the problem, max. I2 hasn't blamed anything on y2k but sap and psft (and some analysts) have. There might be a small relief rally in these stocks right before y2k, maybe November or so but I don't see a revenue boom for Sap and psft after y2k. I actually think psft should try to sell themselves to sebl or IBM (or invent something new). I replied to these three messages backwards so read the thread for more info.

To: Shane M who wrote (1209)	3/11/1999 5:44:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2339

i2 Learns What Not to Say When Talking to Analysts Shane: Here is something I found in Fortune Magazine (Mar.29th edition),thought you might like it. If you recall we have talked about this long before Fortune did,didn't we. I don't own the stock currently but I keep an eye on them as usual. ======================== A Comeback Software Stock Jeanne Lee Sanjiv Sidhu, founder and CEO of i2 Technologies, was announcing another quarter of record earnings last July, and he thought it would be wise to keep investors' expectations from getting out of hand. After all, his 11-year-old company, based in Irving, Texas, is the leading vendor of supply-chain management software. (It helps manufacturers monitor their processes and streamline inventory.) He has powerhouse clients like Dell Computer and Amazon.com. (Amazon uses i2 software to cope with the surge in orders after Oprah Winfrey recommends a book.) But with the stock trading at a multiple of 160 times trailing 12-month earnings--about $41--Sidhu purposely sounded only mildly optimistic in an analysts' conference call, saying, "The quantity of pipeline continues to be large. But we are less than bullish about the quality of the pipeline for this quarter, especially when compared to the large Street expectations." In a market where expectations are everything, Sidhu's cautious tone spooked investors. "[i2] just meant to rein in expectations, but people interpreted it to mean the sky was really falling," explains George Gilbert, a tech analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston. Fueling their anxiety, i2's main competitor--Manugistics, based in Rockville, Md.--had recently missed analysts' estimates and seemed to be flailing. (After an ill-fated effort to find an acquirer, the company has been shopping for a new CEO.) Investors overreacted, and i2's stock plunged 32.5% in barely a week. It hit bottom at $10 on Oct. 8. During this period it looked as if i2 was facing another blow, this one from SAP, the German giant that dominates enterprise-resource-planning software (a company's transactional data "backbone"). SAP used to refer customers to i2 and others for supply-chain software, but in December it launched its own product, called APO. Even before APO's release, SAP "tried to freeze the market by getting customers to be afraid to commit to i2, saying [that because SAP's product] will be integrated, it'll be better," says Gilbert. But APO got so-so reviews, in part because SAP lacks i2's experience in building algorithms that can quickly process what-if scenarios, analysts say. "ERP is essentially a record-keeping task, while supply-chain planning is a decision-making task," says James Pickrel of Hambrecht & Quist. Michael Maguire, SAP's director of supply-chain solutions, protests that it's actually a "seamless natural evolution" from ERP programming to supply-chain programming and says that clients have been "overwhelmed" by APO's quality. As for the charge of freezing the market, he claims that it was the customers who were demanding that their ERP vendors come up with supply-chain solutions. For now, i2 is golden. It leads the supply-chain market with an estimated 12% share. Quarter-over-quarter revenues rose 70% last quarter, to $113 million--blowing away analysts' expectations. The stock is back up to around $27. Next, Sidhu wants to utilize i2's expertise in what-if computing to expand into other "optimization" software (helping businesses make complex decisions in areas like market forecasting). Compaq has already put in a $15 million order. What could go wrong? Sidhu says the real threat is not APO. Rather, he fears that with customers spending $10 billion a year on core ERP, they won't have much left in IT budgets for supply-chain and optimization software. So when it came time to talk to analysts in the fourth quarter, what was Sidhu's spin? "We made significant progress in support of our mission of creating $50 billion in value by year 2005." Now, that sounds downright bullish. Issue date: March 29, 1999 Vol. 139, No. 6 cgi.pathfinder.com