carey_jim

BroadVision Handing Out Free Money

BroadVision has an exceptional CEO (Pehong Chen) and great upper level technical management.

techocracy.net is basically correct, however, in observing that BroadVision websites are (were?) expensive and need(ed) to be maintained by technicians who are experts in BroadVision's proprietary software. (If this has changed, a representative from BroadVision should tell us.)

In the past, BroadVision sites were not difficult for trained computer engineers to maintain but untrained webmasters couldn't maintain them without help from the company.

In the past, BroadVision's business strategy was to attract very large clients with deep enough pockets to afford very costly, up front fees (as high as ten million dollars) and high maintenance costs for the kind of powerful and flexible websites that (BroadVision claimed) no other company could build.

At the end of 2000, BroadVision suffered a precipitous and nearly fatal fall in the price of its stock, along with many other dot com startups, which was only partially due to bad business decisions (It hired too many new employees, acquired too much new real estate and made an unwise acquisition of an XML based company.)

It isn't surprising that its stock has risen, in eight years, from under a dollar to $13 because it has solid management and a brainy CEO (he has a PhD in computer science from U.C. Berkeley) who listens to his employees.

But I think the principle reasons for BroadVision's business problems might still be there:

The rise of Linux, along with free SQL and php as popular and easy to use and maintain database and web programming languages, and the decline of Sun and HP (and even Microsoft) as back end database servers.

This, along with BroadVision's proprietary server side Java (used for calls to the database) and server side Javascript, made it difficult for anyone other than BroadVision trained engineers to maintain and expand BroadVision sites.

It isn't completely certain, of course, that this model can't still work (if indeed it is still being used) into the future.

In the past, BroadVision demonstrated its capacity to provide robust, very large, database driven personalized websites for large corporations, that are easily expandable and easy (for BroadVision engineers!) to maintain.

I don't own the stock but if I decided to buy it, I would have to be convinced that 1) the old business model can still work, 2) AND/OR that a new, more accessible model is in place.