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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (46902)	3/23/1999 11:37:00 AM
From: Mark Fowler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164685

Get some Amzn soon and make up that loss... Happy go easy on those stock options i've seen too many get burnt!

To: HG who wrote (46902)	3/23/1999 2:50:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164685

17 and because they will undoubtedly tap the public markets for capital this year, we thought we would discuss some of the business and technology trends underlying these players ascendancy and their possible further impact in the software space. It is by now well known that client/server (C/S) applications (and thus the ERP vendors) have some difficulty in embracing and extending the Internet and deploying their applications outside of a company's four walls. Internet enterprise applications, however, often excel where C/S applications fail, precisely because they are built with the Internet's universal connectivity (any computer to any computer) in mind and are thus highly scaleable. However, to understand what role these applications and these vendors can play in connecting corporations to their partners, suppliers and customers, we must first determine where and when these applications are more appropriate than traditional C/S applications or EDI solutions and what factors contribute to this (see our chart below). And though we are especially optimistic that Internet applications will become a core part of an enterprise's IT strategy over time, we don't expect to see these vendors compete on the same level as the ERP very soon. Perhaps the important question is: can these Internet applications impact the corporation in ways C/S applications cannot? We believe they can. The single largest area in our opinion for Internet applications vendors to add value to enterprise computing is their ability to extend applications outside of the enterprise. Though the addition of browser front ends to existing ERP systems lowers costs and eases manageability burdens, this functionality is easily embedded (as we've already seen) in an ERP application's functional breadth. And despite the future benefits of developing robust Java clients that allow employees to access, in real time, essential corporate data, MIS managers will be highly reticent to aggressively deploy this functionality when it arrives. Few, if any, IT executives feel secure enough to open their mission critical internal systems to the outside world. Small & Low Size & Frequency of Transactions Large & High Relative Importance of Scalability Essential Important Nature of Business Relationship Loose Tight Back-Office Front-Office Primary Trading Partners Buying Organization 2nd Tier Trading Partners 3nd Tier Trading Partners N-th Tier Trading Partners ERP Internet-Enabled ERP Internet Applications EDI Internet-Enabled EDI B2B E-Commerce Spans Many Constituencies In The Back-Office Intentions, however, would seem to prove us wrong in this assertion, since, according to a Forrester Research poll, some two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies indicated that they intend to use the Internet to execute external transactions within the next two years. So why do we believe that few IT executives will open up their mission-critical internal applications to outsiders soon? Security. Currently more than 33% of Fortune 1000 companies cite security as their primary headache. In the meantime, MIS managers will continue to build out Internet applications for their sales force (product and inventory queries), for customer interaction (product pricing and availability data), and for electronic commerce (product inquiries, order entry, and configuration), but will likely do so within separately managed security zones. These