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Technology Stocks : Datastream Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: DSTM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Shane M who wrote (568)	3/18/1999 10:43:00 PM
From: TimeToMakeTheInvs	Respond to of 721

I like the vote of confidence by management in buying back 500,000 shares. tim

To: Shane M who wrote (568)	3/18/1999 11:00:00 PM
From: Wright Sullivan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 721

Shane- I still have a big chunk of my IRA in DSTM and have an order in a non-IRA account for another good chunk at 7.5, which is probably wishful thinking. But I do understand what Buffett means when he speaks of hoping his favorite stocks will DROP in price. I know DSTM is a good company serving a market which is still largely untapped. So if others will sell me some DSTM for peanuts, great. Yes, Y2K has distorted the ERP sector sales. A year ago it was for the better, now for the worse. It's "patch city" out there now as far as Y2K goes. My company got a Y2K order this morning for a Y2K upgrade we quoted 15 months ago! Procrastination. But companies are now going for the patch and not the big fix, so they're not putting in as many new systems like SAP, and maybe DSTM suffers also. I am very bullish in the 2-5 year term on DSTM because: -Companies are replacing outdated mainframe and AS/400-based CMMS systems installed in the late 80's/early 90's. -Many companies have some CMMS but do not use it beyond work orders and scheduling. There is a whole level of efficiency yet to be extracted from maintenance operations. -Quite a few plants have no CMMS at all yet. -DSTM dominates the client-server CMMS market, and they are moving aggressively to expand international sales. -eMRO and "maintenance portal" approaches could contribute significantly to earnings at little cost. Negatives: -Price of software has dropped significantly over the past couple years, so they need to sell more to maintain profits. -I'm not sure their sales structure has morphed well to a higher-volume lower-price approach. -In theory, SAP and others may muscle into DSTM's space--maintenance tracking ain't rocket science. (But I think companies are getting burned out on the SAP-over-all strategy and going more for the best-of-breed, with a good interface to SAP. So it cuts both ways.). What of the very near term? I don't know. My gut tells me that this quarter will be modest and then things will roll, but that's not based on any real facts. But I see little or no chance that DSTM will be wiped out all of a sudden by SAP or others. And the current price has so much pessimism built in already. A final comment: I think that ERP in general remains a wave with plenty of steam left in it, simply because there is so much out there yet to be accomplished with ERP. It still looks to me like PC's did in the late 1980's. You had people who said we had reached saturation because PC sales volume had doubled or tripled, but the reality was that PC's were just starting to generate significant benefits for the companies installing them. ERP is the same--It is a pain in the neck to implement (now) and yet companies are deriving benefit from it. Isn't it a logical progression that the ERP pie will grow as it becomes easier to implement? Kind regards, Wright