gac26uk

Sounds like a Co I know!

M

Not us, but you can see where software is going.

http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3372101

June 22, 2004
Will Salesforce IPO Float All Boats?
By Susan Kuchinskas

Interest is high in salesforce.com's initial public offering.

On Tuesday, it raised the expected opening price a second time, from a high of $8.50 per share to $11, in expectation of raking in around $110 million dollars.

The San Francisco-based provider of hosted customer relationship and sales force management applications is slated to launch on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CRM.

Two other software-on-demand companies are in quiet periods in advance of their own offerings, and couldn't express their anticipation. RightNow Technologies, provider of applications for customer service and call centers, and WebSideStory, which offers Web traffic analytics tools, have registered with the SEC their intent to go public.

In the software-as-service model, customers typically pay a flat monthly subscription fee to use applications as much as they want; access is via a Web interface. Their data resides in secure partitioned servers maintained by the vendor.

Vendors provide software upgrades and enhancements at no extra charge, freeing customers from having to maintain applications and servers. Application service providers (ASPs), hosted applications, utility computing and software on-demand all refer to variations of the model.

The rising tide of excitement could float competitors' boats -- in more ways than one.

First, of course, is the investment it could draw. Tom Taulli, author of "Investing in IPOs," said there's a lot riding on salesforce.com's success. "VCs are not very smart," said Taulli, who also is a principal in investment firm Bridgewater Capital. If salesforce.com has a strong showing, he said, "They'll probably say, "Let's start funding applications as services companies. That's where the market is going.'"

Even though software-on-demand is unproven for large enterprise customers, Taulli said, for investors, perception is important. "It might encourage VC and angel activity, maybe even convince some companies to transition their business models. It could have significant impact."

Sheryl Kingstone, Yankee Group analyst, said she wishes salesforce.com's public offering well. "A negative IPO will put a damper on a very new type of technology that's just getting off the ground," she said. Kingstone finds hosted applications a viable option for plenty of businesses. "It's not for everyone," she said, "but so what?"

At the same time, all the buzz could be seen as the official kick-off to the "end of software" concept that salesforce.com relentlessly touts.

"[The IPO] signals the beginning of this new software industry," said Steve Kusmer, CEO of Atomz. "It's a sign of how the industry is moving forward." Atomz' On-Demand Web Site Solutions include search, content management, online marketing and promotions functions.

On-demand players like Atomz and salesforce.com love to talk trash about the on-premise software providers. And they're taking this opportunity to pile it on. "Companies like Vignette, Siebel, PeopleSoft are the dinosaurs," Kusmer said. "Our companies are the mammals. We're warm-blooded and evolving a lot faster than those folks."

Mike Doyle, CEO of Salesnet, said the company would be "firmly on the sidelines with our pompoms raised for Salesforce.com to have a successful offering." Salesnet is another provider of Web-based CRM.

While Salesnet isn't contemplating going public until next year, Doyle said salesforce.com's offering will act as a bellwether.

"The intriguing thing about all this is what the [price-to-earnings] multiple the public will give recurring revenue, as opposed to the hit and miss of traditional software revenues," he said. Software [on-demand providers book income from subscriptions every month, while traditional software license revenue typically is booked no more than once a year. "Our bet is the public will give a higher value to a revenue stream that is predictable, rather than the hit-or-miss sort of drive-by sales," he said.

Wake Up Call For The Industry


Indeed, while the jury is out on whether on-demand is a revolution in the software industry, this spate of IPOs is certainly a wake-up call for investors.

In April, investment bank Merrill Lynch launched an On Demand Index, telling customers, "On Demand practices will change the way customers buy, vendors sell, and investors invest." The index of 75 companies tracks what percentage of licensing revenues come from subscriptions versus traditional licenses in order to help investors understand how this model will change the software industry.

Wall Street will have to learn new ways to value these companies, Merrill cautioned. The bank told investors to look carefully at deferred revenue and cash flow, instead of focusing on the company's income statement.

"For vendors, the longer-term viability of the model is predicated on strong annualized contract value renewal rates," the Merrill Lynch note said. "This is very important because, without a strong renewal rate, the On-Demand model simply masks a longer-term slowdown in bookings."

Investors should take note that salesforce.com -- and the sector as a whole -- will endure cutthroat competition. Niche players will slash prices while heavyweights muscle in. According to Forrester Research, Siebel CRM OnDemand should reach feature parity with salesforce.com in six to nine months, while SAP is likely to enter the game.

While salesforce.com may have drawn customers away from the packaged software business, smaller companies are nipping at its heels, offering to migrate customer' data from salesforce.com to their services free, then charging less.

SalesJunction.com, a competing provider of hosted CRM services, will up the ante next Monday when it introduces SalesJunction Professional, an offering that adds collaboration features and automated e-mail follow-up via templates. Company president Paul Luby said the product easily scales up to thousands of users -- and it costs just $15 per month per seat.

"[Salesforce.com] is very vulnerable on the price point," Luby said. "They'll get competitive pressure from us and others. They'll get hurt down the line, because no way can they keep that price point."

"Everyone is jumping onto the space," said Yankee Group's Kingstone. Siebel Systems (Quote, Chart), Oracle (Quote, Chart) and IBM already have various flavors of on-demand offerings, with Siebel CRM OnDemand armed to take a bite out of salesforce.com. IBM declined to comment for this story.

Siebel, long the butt of salesforce.com's advertising, is moving aggressively into software as service, said Ken Rudin, vice president and general manager for Siebel CRM OnDemand. But Rudin said it's not about the delivery method. It's about how customers want their applications. "I'm agnostic. We can provide CRM solutions under any model they want. I see the market going to hybrid solutions," he said. "Companies will offer a combination of hosted and on-premises software."

Salesforce.com's IPO is just business as usual for Siebel. "Let's put this in perspective," Rubin said. "The amount of money they'll generate from an IPO is less than what we generate every single quarter; last quarter, the number of users we added overall was almost twice as many as they have added in their entire corporate history. Hey, welcome to the party, guys, but this really doesn't change anything."

Now may be the time for small, nimble on-demand companies to shine, but this sector may be subject to the same consolidation as any other segment. In a recent survey of IT and business decision-makers by Summit Strategies, analyst Tom Kucharvy found high recognition and acceptance of the software-as-service model, with small to mid-sized companies most interested in deploying it. (This survey lumped together vendors offering their own applications and hosts of third-party apps.)

But when asked which companies would be a favored source for on-demand applications, independent companies like salesforce.com were way down the list. These executives' top choices were Microsoft and IBM. IBM has spent millions of dollars advertising its On Demand offerings, but Microsoft doesn't provide any software this way.

The results show two things, according to Kucharvy. "We want somebody we're sure is going to be around, somebody that's reliable, in whom we can have long-term confidence," he said. "Second, customers like one vendor offering an integrated environment, rather than a single solution -- things that are more tied together. But a suite offering from an independent means it's inherently going to be for a much smaller business and not able to address the comprehensive needs of a larger business."

That suite spot could make salesforce.com and its brethren little boats in the big pond of enterprise software. The IPO could tell whether that idea sinks or swims.

Erin Joyce contributed to this story.

Can anyone be bothered to read a long statement like that? sorry.

Guess it depends how much you have invested and how interested you are!

Your choice.

M

Greetings all Tad holders.

Moneylender.......... you've been getting me up early for two weeks.

How much longer must I wait? Yaaaaaaawn!

Have a good weekend all.

Regards


Amar

amardev
I would imagine the interims will be revealed this week, so not many more early mornings.
:-)

amardev

I am assured by Patcom that TAD will conform with
LSE rules and produce the intrims within 90 days of the end of the period,
ie next Wed.
I am still of the opinion that TAD have something up their sleeve, why else
would they go to the wire as far as a release date is concerned? Any way we will know by Wed morning one way or the other.

Now remember be up early Monday! the odds are shortening.

M

Well looks like it its tomorrow then. I must say I am surpised that
there has been no more good news before the intrims.

Still I guess they could announce something at the same time, or am i clutching at straws here?

M

ML - You are building a house of straw, but as I am currently a tenant I promise not to light a match.

Article in today's Computerworld on AppsX and P2P


Opinion by Mark Hall

JUNE 28, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Back in 1985, I shoehorned my way into a room packed with Sun Microsystems engineers to listen to company co-founder Bill Joy talk about on-demand computing. He was one of the earliest thinkers on the subject. Of course, that's not what he was calling it back then. And he wasn't talking about servers with capacity on demand either. His ideas revolved around how to exploit all those idle MIPS on desktop workstations, which was all Sun made at the time.
Nearly 20 years later Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other vendors are touting on-demand computing as an advanced server-centric technology that can help manage peak-and-valley processing-load problems while keeping costs down. Each vendor has its own technical approach (and terminology) for how servers can be leveraged in an on-demand model. But they're not talking about desktops any longer. And that's a shame, because there are still some interesting applications where the on-demand model works well for workstations.

For example, Greg Bolcer, chief technology officer and founder of Endeavors Technology Inc. in Irvine, Calif., says providing Windows applications on demand would be ideal for things such as user training or application testing.

"It makes no sense to install a full application on a desktop if the user isn't going to be working with it for an extended period of time," says Bolcer.

And he's right. That's why he came up with AppExpress. It streams Windows software to PCs on an as-needed basis. According to Bolcer, it takes as little as 1% and no more than 10% of an application to be loaded on a Windows system before the operating system (with the help of an AppExpress agent) can launch it while the rest of the bits are flowing down the wire. That means users can start working almost immediately.

AppExpress might also appeal to IT managers who want to ensure that all of their users are working with the same release of an application. Instead of the IT department remotely loading desktops with software that users might spiff up with plug-ins or updates from CDs, every user can load the same version of an application from a single server that's centrally managed. Bolcer claims it works with both commercial products and custom applications.

Another on-demand computing tool is peer-to-peer software. Yes, it can be the bane of your existence if some of your users are hip music lovers who continue to flaunt copyright laws and chew up network bandwidth exchanging MP3 files. But peer-to-peer can be applied cleverly to benefit your users.

Or so thinks Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association in Arlington, Va. His group's goal is to legitimize the now-stigmatized file-sharing protocol in the eyes of the entertainment industry so that more content will be made available to peer-to-peer users. While that's a Promethean task given the Luddite mentality of most entertainment executives, he may actually get more immediate traction with IT vendors that can leverage the protocol for knowledge-based applications.

Peer-to-peer, Lafferty suggests, is "an ideal protocol for the discovery and delivery of content." With it, knowledge management applications and search engines will be able to reach "the next level" of capability, he says.

Imagine a peer-to-peer application running inside a pharmaceutical company's R&D department. Each time one researcher learns something from an experiment, the results can be automatically provided to other interested scientists. Although there are knowledge management systems that do similar things today, they are tough to implement, difficult to manage and expensive to deploy. Peer-to-peer is a straightforward, open protocol anyone can use.

Both Bolcer and Lafferty are grateful that the big vendors are endlessly bending your ear with chatter about the advantages of on-demand computing.

"We're riding that wave," Bolcer says. "It's nice not having to educate users on the benefits of on-demand computing."

However, before advocates of on-demand computing for desktops ride the crest of that wave inside IT departments, they'll need to apply the system management discipline common among server vendors. For one thing, they'll need to factor in complex corporate security requirements, which are easier to manage on servers than on individual desktops. Managing bandwidth for on-demand purposes that emanate from desktops is tougher than controlling it from servers.

That's why we're seeing so much of the on-demand excitement and development on these centralized server systems.

Still, the server vendors are ignoring the beginning of the on-demand computing story: the part that begins on your desktop. Mark Hall is a Computerworld editor at large. Contact him at mark_hall@computerworld.com.

*****************

Good find Midazminaz
all the best
pjjw

Endeavors Technology is sending you this newsletter to keep you updated on technology that allows you to deliver applications on-demand. For instructions on how to unsubscribe from receiving future email notifications using SafeUnsubscribe, please scroll down to the bottom of the page.


On-Demand Electronic Software Delivery (ESD): Safeguarding the distribution of interactive digital content
June 29th, 2004
Distributing digital content, such as documents, music, photos and video, is an inherently insecure exercise. It is hard enough to prevent a hostile attacker from copying information, but altogether impossible to re-assert control over information thats already been revealed to a legitimate user through traditional distribution methods.

Protecting most forms of human-readable, -audible, or viewable content is, at best, ineffectual. The final result of all that decryption and authorization is the intellectual property itself: the original document, in the clear, ready for re-encoding and re-presentation.

However, interactive content such as software applications do not face that limit. The fundamental nature of software is that it cant be reduced to a simple, static movie each and every input from the user could affect the entire user experience. As the software executes, it has the ability to re-verify an ongoing relationship between the user and licensor at runtime.

Unlike other types of multimedia content, software packages do not need to be revealed in the clear in their entirety to be useful. As a result, software content can remain encrypted end-to-end, while still taking advantage of on-line validation to ensure fine-grained usage control.

In the case of Electronic Software Distribution (ESD), there are new solutions that grant users more limited access than a full, unencumbered copy of an entire application. At one extreme, we see online (networked) license managers that must be compiled into an application by the original developer (e.g. FlexLM or NetQuartz. At the other, we see hardware tokens that must be physically interrogated by the running instance (e.g. Rainbows dongles).

In between lies an ideal: an application protection technique that enforces use rights without modifying the underlying application code. Endeavors Technology Inc.s AppExpress technology hits this mark by modifying how the Windows file system works. Rather than copying over an entire application in-the-clear, AppExpress makes it look like the files are available, while actually downloading encrypted fragments of the original on the fly and, more importantly, re-validating the users right to access those files, say, every ten minutes. This means that it can effectively protect digital content that requires repeated access over time: the precise difference between static multimedia files and interactive software files.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ask the OD Guru -
What is the difference between Digital Rights Management and Electronic Software Distribution?
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is about enforcing copyrights, Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) is about enforcing usage rights. While there is some overlap - an application install CD-ROM is physically identical to a CD containing a videogame, photographs, or music - there is clearly room for a different sort of protection mechanism designed specifically for ESD, whether it is software or hardware.

When delivering applications online, how can we ensure that the applications are safe from corruption or hacking?
There is a difference between securing applications and securing the application delivery process. A solution such as AppExpress is all about securing the application delivery process. Its goal is to deliver the exact same user experience that would have resulted from installing an unprotected copy (i.e. from a CD-ROM) so that the application, once authorized to execute, could do anything that a 'normal' Microsoft Windows application could. Therefore, AppExpress is about enforcing the security of application distribution. On the other hand, there are various products and services available on the market that are designed to enhance the security of an application once it's installed. Such solutions approach application security by checking for viruses or worms, depending on other public-key security infrastructure, or preventing leaking private data ("spyware".


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Send your questions about on-demand application delivery to our resident OD Guru at joea@endeavors.com.

From iii

Paleface
It shows what the future holds I believe.

Midaz - surely the Computerworld article is bad for Tad - irrespective on what Tad can offer, it seems that the computer community are looking elsewhere at server-centric operability?

Pachandl
I did not read that all looks pretty positive for tad to me

Tadpole Technology plc
June 29, 2004

Tadpole Technology plc
Interim Results for the period October 1, 2003 - March 31, 2004

Highlights

* Turnover increased by 39% to #2.6m, operating loss reduced by 30% to
#1.8m compared with H1 2003

* Endeavors begins to come on-stream, wins on-demand streaming software
contracts for its AppExpress enterprise-focused technology. Customers
now include Autodesk, MCI, Microsoft and Wyse Technology. EDS
appointed AppExpress master reseller to its world-wide customer base

* Cartesia delivers small profit; extends order book from new ESRI-based
product lines; customer wins include US municipalities and JEA electic
utility

* Outlook - the Board is pleased with the continued progress of the
subsidiaries in implementing the 3-year business plans defined in
2003. It expects further improvements in the Group's trading
performance in 2004

Enquiries

Keith Bigsby, CFO, Tadpole Technology plc - 0207 987 4888 (until 16.30)
Mike Brennan, Evolution Beeson Gregory - Tel 0207 488 4040
Hugh Paterson, Patcom Media - Tel 0207 987 4888


CHAIRMAN'S STATEMENT

Financial Results

Turnover from continuing operations in the first half of 2004 increased by 39%
compared with the same period last year, gross margins rose from 40% to 59% and
operating expenses were cut from #3.0 million to #2.6 million. A consequent
reduction in operating losses, from #2.6 million to #1.8 million, was achieved.

Endeavors

Good progress has been achieved in building customer and partner relationships.
On 5 January, we announced a world-wide master reseller agreement with EDS. This
was followed by an announcement on 19 January that a major US telecommunications
company had chosen our AppExpress on-demand application streaming technology for
the deployment of Windows-based programs to the telco's customer base and
throughout its own enterprise. Earlier this month, the name of the telco was
revealed when MCI announced its new service offering which embeds our
technology.

On 17 June, we announced that Microsoft had selected AppExpress to stream trial
versions of consumer software products to customers. The initial value of the
contract is based upon the number of downloads by potential Microsoft customers
up to an aggregate amount of $100,000.

We also continue to develop our relationship with Autodesk, expanding the
applications using our trialware solution and enlarging the site to include
Autodesk's European customers.

With the growing success of our sales activities, we expect to start generating
further revenues and improved operating results by the end of the current fiscal
year.

Cartesia

Turnover grew by 41% generating an operating profit of #75k compared with a loss
of #320k in the same period last year.

The strategic decision to invest in developing products based on ESRI technology
continues to generate rewards. Through direct sales activity, partnership with
ESRI regional offices in the USA and business relationships with other ESRI
partners and distributors, Cartesia has supplied its Go!Sync data
synchronization products to clients in its target market sectors. Of particular
note is the recent $500k contract win with electricity utility JEA in the USA.
We are encouraged by the accelerating interest in our ESRI-focused technology
and it is planned to continue investing in the Go!Sync product set, an example
being the addition of data synchronisation to ESRI's ArcPad pocket PC platform.

Cartesia anticipates growing demand for its data synchronisation and management
technology and is positioned to exploit these opportunities through the
remainder of 2004 and into 2005. We expect a significant increase in the
business unit's revenues and operating results during the second half of this
financial year compared with the first half.

Outlook

The Board is pleased with the continued progress of the subsidiaries in
implementing the 3-year business plans defined in 2003. It expects further
improvements in the Group's trading performance in 2004.

David Lee
Chairman
29 June 2004


FINANCIAL REVIEW

Results semm fine to me, but obviously not enough for the few remaining short termers, 59% profit margins are bloody great once they get the business.

Cheers,

Paleface

and yet the price is dropping what the hell is going on

Traders getting out. They sell on news and buy on rumour.
Maybe they havent heard the latest rumour yet!!
Rumoured to be announced this week!!


M

Only a TAD enthusiast could try to bolster our spirits by announcing that there is a rumour that a rumour will be announced this week. Sorry M, but it did make me smile. I'm still a holder.