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

To: Shane M who wrote (619)	5/15/1999 9:44:00 PM
From: blankmind	Respond to of 721

shane - like I've been saying - DSTM is for real - and the sub-$10 prices just wouldn't stick - especially after these last two very impressive quarters

To: Shane M who wrote (619)	5/15/1999 9:57:00 PM
From: dylan murphy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 721

The news release about the web site will be on Monday. The web site itself was opened on Wed. To view the web site go maintenance.com I watched this stock for awhile. This would seem to be a compelling reason to buy in.

To: Shane M who wrote (619)	6/12/1999 1:09:00 AM
From: Wright Sullivan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 721

Shane- Today I attended DSTM annual meeting here in Greenville, and I have posted a summary on the Yahoo thread under "fieldbus", my nom de guerre over there. I remain significantly long DSTM and hope you have enjoyed the recent strength also. Here's my Yahoo post: The annual meeting was worthwhile. Larry Blackwell is a bit of a character, and has a good sense of humor, although nobody seemed to get his jokes. Larry and Alex (CFO) made a presentation, which is apparently the same one they have been giving the investment community recently. The presentation contained nothing new, but it is interesting to see what they emphasized. They stressed the concept of selling from the bottom of the market up. Their low-low end products are very cheap and designed to get customers who can later be pulled up to the next rung. He mentioned that about 2% of these customers per month (I think this was the figure, but not positive) upgrade to the next level. License revenues for MP2 Client-Server and MP5 (the high end products) now make up more than half of DSTM's revenue, and these products didn't exist at DSTM just two years ago (MP5 was acquired, MP2 C-S was developed). Predictably, both e-MRO and Maintenance.com were featured heavily, because both are e-commerce initiatives and are seen as huge potential revenue sources in the future. Neither is significant yet. Larry gave a very brief overview of e-MRO complete with (one) screen shot. This was one of the most interesting points, for me, because it dawned on me that they were actually enabling comparison shopping for maintenance parts. I have been following the e-MRO initiative closely, but I had not seen it in this light previously. Before this, I looked at e-MRO like the an on-line supplier (such as Amazon.com): It saved time, paperwork, and money and you were able to order from a vendor you trusted and who provided good service (Wesco, Fastenal, etc.). But during Larry's comments, I began to view e-MRO like the bestbookbuys.com model: You tell it what you want and it tells you who has it and which is cheapest and which is in stock. This moves e-MRO from the realm of convenient to the realm of indispensable. Maintenance managers are generally under enormous budget pressures from management, and will love the easy comparison shopping for parts, in my opinion. Larry also hinted at the barriers to entry in this space, where DSTM has an advantage. Each supplier (and the original OEM as well) have different part numbers for a given maintenance part, so you can't just search on one part number like you can look up a book title at Amazon. So by cross-referencing all these parts, DSTM gains a proprietary edge over others who aren't going to this trouble (they won't know which part numbers are the same and which are different). My personal opinion is that all this cross referencing must be a whole lot bigger job than they are hinting at now. But I think they are chipping away at it and perhaps are developing a monster cross-reference database. Regarding potential competitors in this space (business-to-business e-commerce is a very lucrative target), they said that they feel that by working with their smaller customers starting out, they can achieve success step-by-step and not take an all-or-nothing (must succeed) approach by trying to automate the maintenance parts purchasing of massive companies first. But once they have a proven system on a small scale, it will be easy to scale it up to their larger customers. They relish the opportunity to take 2% of all these e-MRO sales, and showed some charts purporting to graph the growth estimates for the e-commerce market. One showed $1.x billion of e-commerce market in 1998 and estimates of $80 billion in 2000, with a growth rate of 187% a year. I either didn't understand something or their growth calculation is off by an order of magnitude, but the gist of it was that they see the potential e-MRO market as huge. True enough, but how much they can get remains an open question. That's enough on e-MRO. The maintenance.com discussion was informative and humorous. Larry said that they were trying to position themselves as a portal (who isn't anymore?). He said he didn't know what a portal was until his daughter explained it to him. This was one of several folksy references to himself as just an old guy. I wasn't buying any of this stuff. The maintenance.com portal mixes a user's specific real-time info from DSTM's software with other info from the internet on a pleasant screen. Sort of a blue collar at-work version of "my yahoo". It looked plausible, and they stressed that they are going after a clientele that nobody else is targeting--joe maintenance man, who is already their customer. Not much discussion of the auctions at maintenance.com, but they are hopeful about this potential source of revenue. They repeatedly stressed that their biggest asset is their large customer base. They may not make money from license revenue to the smallest customers, but they see many ways to make money from these customers in the future. They did not say much about the overseas performance, good or bad. In response to questions about competition from ERP vendors, they said that they see much more positive than negative here. They indicated that the ERP vendors generally have much weaker CMMS offerings than DSTM's, and that they have been very successful by offering very good connectivity to those packages (SAP, etc.). I'm sure I will think of more, but that gives a pretty good flavor of the meeting. All these observations are from memory and my opinion only. I hope this information is useful.