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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert McHale who wrote (1622)	5/1/1999 12:30:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

THIS MONTH IN THE FRONT OFFICE - Part 1 ALERT: For the first time, I am making a change in our Front Office Gorilla Game. Using the prices at the close of the market, I will reduce exposure to Clarify and distribute the funds equally among two of the three other stocks. Details and reasoning are provided below. The News Vantive continues to have such severe problems that founding chairman and CEO John Luongo is no longer associated with the company. The new CEO and chairman is former board member, Thomas L. Thomas. a former "Senior Vice President of e-Business and Information Services and Chief Information Officer of 3Com Corporation (Nasdaq:COMS). He has lead 3Com's electronic business initiative, which was responsible for over $1.6 billion in revenues in 1998." Prior to that he was the CIO at Dell. While at Sara Lee, "he lead the development of a Sales Force Automation Distribution and Marketing System, which was a precursor to the front and back office product suites of today and was also the focus of a Harvard Business School case study in 1986." As much as people are focusing on the ERP players moving into the front office software turf, it took many of us (certainly me) by surprise to see that Lucent will acquire Mosaix, a maker of customer service management software, for $145 million in stock. This fits nicely with Lucent's customer base using telephone customer service reps. I see this not so much as a threat to the independent front office software companies as Lucent's way of leveraging their already highly successful telephony business. PeopleSoft's CEO was quoted in Information Week as "exploring other alternatives" to the existing relationships with Siebel and Vantive. Some interpret that to mean he will consider buying a second-tier front office software company. As I mentioned on AOL, "I take that to mean that the price of PeopleSoft's stock is low enough that they can't afford the cost of a first-tier company. Tsk tsk." See my next post in a fixed font for Part 2, a discussion of the stocks and the changes in the portfolio. --Mike Buckley