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To: Shell Searcher who wrote (102)	3/29/1999 10:01:00 AM
From: Shell Searcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1101

zdnet.com Net Consultants Challenge IT Giants By Mel Duvall March 16, 1999 12:57 PM ET The systems integration landscape appears to be in for a major shake-up, as a raft of Internet consulting firms makes serious advances into corporate America. No longer content to build Web storefronts and corporate intranets, the fleet-footed firms are bidding on, and winning, contracts that once were considered the exclusive territory of the information technology (IT) services giants. Last week, Scient, a San Francisco Internet specialist that bills itself as "The eBusiness Innovator," upped the ante by announcing it is forming a business unit to go after the telecommunications sector. Randall McComas, vice president of telecommunications at IBM Global, has been lured away to head the company's effort. McComas said now that the world's telcos have resolved most of their year-2000 (Y2K) issues, they'll be turning their full attention to streamlining their operations through Internet technologies and jumping on e-business opportunities. Scient (www.scient.com) thinks it, and not the IT services giants, is better suited for the task. "This is not the old classical integration market anymore," McComas said. "You're reinventing these companies, their entire go-to-market strategies, or you're inventing them from scratch." Upstart Internet consulting firms in recent months have sealed wins with a long list of blue-chip clients and quickly are becoming the new darlings of Wall Street. IXL (www.ixl.com), an Atlanta-based Internet integrator that signed a $50 million, five-year deal with Delta Airlines in January, has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $86 million in an initial public offering. Joining iXL on the public offering floor are Proxicom (www.proxicom.com), a Virginia-based Internet integrator that hopes to raise up to $75 million, and Razorfish (www.razorfish.com), a quirky New York-based company that is looking to raise $50 million. Part of the reason for the investor interest is a continuing stream of forecasts, which show the business-to-business electronic commerce market is set to explode. The forecasts should benefit all areas of the IT services industry, including the Big Five consulting/ accounting firms and the likes of Andersen Consulting and EDS, not just the Internet upstarts. But while Internet specialists such as USWeb/ CKS and CMGI have experienced spectacular gains, the big IT firms' shares have been languishing. Scott Smith, an analyst at Current Analysis (www.currentanalysis.com), said the giants haven't exactly been asleep at the wheel, but may have been too busy with Y2K computer problems, Euro currency conversions and enterprise resource planning implementations to fully combat the new threat.