Research 2.0 Monthly May, 2007

THE TECHNOLOGY MONTHLY Volume 2, Number 4 May 31, 2007

BOSTON|NEW YORK|PARIS www.research2zero.com

In this issue: Not your grandfather’s .NET The new client software battle royal: Vista vs. Apollo vs. Open Source SOA is dead, long live SOA Stock story updates: MEMC, AT&T, 3Com Adoption watch

Not your grandfather’s .NET Over the last several weeks we have revisited Microsoft’s .NET and some of the related technology moves they are making with Vista. Many investors seem to be out of date on .NET and unfamiliar with some Vista-driven technology improvements that may help Microsoft in the client software area as well (see next story.) There is still a major dose of religious fervor in the software industry, so we took pains to avoid input from most evangelists. Instead we focused on pragmatists who have decades of experience across a broad range of software technologies and are charged with delivering sophisticated commercial software with demanding requirements and limited resources. Perhaps the most striking value of .NET is the efficiency it affords over other platforms. It’s the ability to get to the job at hand vs. building scaffolding to get started. Because .NET includes runtime server libraries, UI components and Visual Studio it needs little added infrastructure to build an application. Developers can focus mostly on the logic and user requirements instead of adding to the technology platform itself. In most cases the resources required to build an equivalent system in alternative environments is estimated to be some multiple over what was required with .NET. It’s obvious that Microsoft has by far the largest installed base of technology and users today. It’s fair to say that in the corporate and consumer world Microsoft is ubiquitous. This situation is unlikely to change soon due to the fact that corporations are generally satisfied with their Microsoft products and have made massive investments of capital, custom applications and training. The appeal of something new that has a few advantages over Microsoft isn’t very compelling to enterprises. It’s worth noting that a major proponent of an open-source alternative platform called LAMP (Linux,

Apache, MySQL, PHP) has discovered that the enterprise market just has no appetite for creating a whole new infrastructure outside of their existing Java and .NET options. The corporate investment in applications, training and management infrastructure is a huge obstacle to overcome. The contrast between an enterprise solution that is LAMP-based vs. .NET is stark. In the case of .NET one small company we know quickly vaulted to $30M in sales growing to $60M this year while with LAMP most still stuck at the “educate the market” stage in the enterprise. There’s no question that Java-based systems today are quite mainstream and common choices in enterprise settings. Thanks to open source projects such as Eclipse and other efforts the richness of the offerings and supporting infrastructure has grown into a mature platform. Just as some would say that the problem with .NET is that it is so “Microsoft,” we would counter that the rest tend to be so “Java.” Furthermore there are plenty of additional language implementations and toolsets for .NET. There is even a Linux implementation of .NET available as an open source project. Consumers are a different matter altogether, but they have made it clear that the one thing they are not interested in is solutions that force them to learn something about technology. The attempts to counter this with free software and “plug-ins” have not gone well from a usability standpoint. Today there are many versions and frequent updates that users and companies are not excited to download and use for many reasons, not the least of which is security. The plug-in problem is a serious one for the industry. Our position is that the success of YouTube stems from a small thing that they did which is to allow a user to simply hit the play button and enjoy the video where they were looking at it. Other solutions involved player downloads, windows opening up, buffering delays and other adoption-stopping steps to see the

content. Similar problems exist for different versions of Adobe Flash and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Organizations such as Mozilla are trying to improve the situation for their own products, but it’s tough going. Most of the attention and reviews of Vista have been on the negative side. However many would agree that the UI is a step forward, and the OS has much improved security. Until the first service pack is shipped and the hardware requirements are sorted out it will be in early adoption stage. However there is little question that over time the installed base will be moving. It’s been fashionable to talk about just upgrading existing XP systems and installing the new UI and browser. At first it seems like a great idea, but it still involves time, money and effort. When the time comes, it often makes more sense to buy a new machine with the new OS and software installed. In any case it will be a multi-year process, but alternatives are limited. Most users can’t switch to Apple, and alternatives such as Google Apps and Linux desktops just aren’t near ready for production use. The final nail in the coffin of the upgrade argument will come from a new generation of Windows-based computers, especially laptops and notebooks that are enough to make an Apple user sit up and take notice. One recent example is the Intel-Ziba Think Thin model, which is a beauty but is only one of many coming into the market this year. Microsoft has suffered over the years in part because almost nobody is making the kind of laptop that users want to carry. If one or more of these designs become hits it can offer price/performance advantages in addition to design and usability excellence that will help preserve and extend the Microsoft customer base. Beyond development platforms, the advertising game isn’t over yet despite the great success Google is having. One area that Microsoft is leading in is games. Most investors don’t appreciate the strength Microsoft is building there. Beyond games there are several other places where Microsoft can still obtain a leadership position and consolidate into a respectable share of digital advertising and improved investor perception vis-a-vis Google. Its recent acquisitions in the space bring critical mass of talent and industry expertise into the fold that will need to be successfully integrated for the overall effort to be sustained. So where does that leave us on Microsoft? We would summarize as follows:   © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

 

• • • • •

The Microsoft platform is far more attractive for building and running real applications than investors think. The new UI capabilities using IE 7 and Windows are very powerful and may be a leapfrog situation over more existing solutions. Microsoft is ubiquitous and has usability and security advantages over other platforms. Microsoft is developing success in digital advertising with strength in gaming and meaningful recent acquisitions. The perception of Microsoft in these areas by the press and investors is negative in part thanks to the love affair with Google and Apple.

Taken together we think the points above argue for a long-term positive view of Microsoft stock. It’s a little premature to produce a full valuation analysis on the company. The shares, which have traded in a range for the last seven years, reflect about an 18x P/E on 2008 estimates. Without a re-rating the shares can scrape their way to $35. However if perceptions and sentiment improves from the current ebb we could certainly envision something in the $40 range. Those that don’t find 15% annual returns interesting might consider an options strategy to amplify the effects. – Kris Tuttle

The new client software battle royal After several years of relative peace the major vendors are again innovating and spending heavily to capture market share in the client software space. We remember how painful the browser wars were, and everyone was thankful when they ended and developers could build functionality that just worked. Of course the richness of the UI would eventually have to be improved. Today we stand at a point where the open source community has fielded a host of new technologies, the most popular being AJAX, which Google broke into the mainstream by using it for its Maps product. The two vendor-based approaches Flash from Adobe and Microsoft with IE 7, plus additional technologies and OS integration. Since the Macromedia acquisition, Adobe has been moving toward advancing the tools to build, deploy and enjoy rich Web-based applications. So far, however, it has had very limited success outside of its traditional core markets. Adobe still seems like two companies rather than one. Its Creative Suite remains a  

Page ‐ 2

 

nearly unavoidable standard set of very expensive products but isn’t integrated a great deal with the Web and the Macromedia portfolio yet. Macromedia products still have strong market positions (Dreamweaver, Flash), but it hasn’t changed much during a time when AJAX, PHP and other tools have been springing up around them. The larger question posed now, especially with Google launching Gears, is how much affinity Adobe can have in conjunction with the next generation of online services and content. Microsoft has been fairly quiet on this front until now, but the release of IE 7 and then Vista started the wheels turning, especially when one sees that Web content in IE 7 is rendered using native Windows controls when running Vista (and probably soon an upgraded XP.) This gives Microsoft an edge in delivering a rich UI without a huge team of developers. More recently, Microsoft has launched Silverlight, its own cross-platform set of Web development tools and runtimes. There’s some general industry excitement around Silverlight, which as been amplified with more interesting announcements such as Popfly. Popfly is not yet generally released but offers a Microsoft version of the popular mash-up technique for generating new Web applications. While not a new concept, the implementation here looks to be well beyond anything we have seen before, and the key to this technique being useful has more to do with back-end integration and the ability to leverage real services (not just Flickr, Google Maps and Craigslist) to build meaningful new applications. We currently use mostly open source and Adobe tools to build our own applications and have looked at most of the new client-side technologies. The latest offerings from Microsoft are pretty compelling. If this level of execution continues, we believe Microsoft could at least stop losing share and might be able to claw some back. The part of the story we will be watching most closely is the ability of the new tools and technologies to work well with non-Microsoft systems ranging from OS X to Google. The cross-platform support in Silverlight is pretty good, but we have to see it all in the field before we can be sure. This is the first time our attention has turned this way. – Kris Tuttle

We don’t think it was any coincidence that five out of six of the case studies presented at the May 15-16, 2007 InfoWorld Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Executive Forum in NYC represented activity in the services supply chain. In the product supply chain, manufacturers have always been laggards when it comes to IT adoption, at least outside their R&D labs. Similarly, retailers and distributors have been historically slow on IT uptake except at the point of sale. On the other hand, service providers have tended to look to IT first for a leg up on competition. Banks, insurers, engineers, service bureaus, the transportation industry, and others have automated and re-automated their entire business process flows more than once throughout the history of IT. They not only automate the key processes in delivering their flagship services but also support their back offices and supplier/client-contact points with the latest, greatest IT. For that reason, we look to the services industries to gauge the uptake of SOA. Enterprises that provide service for a living seem to “get it” when it comes to something called “service oriented.” • •

• •

They understand the importance of service level agreements in real life, so they understand it in terms of its IT meaning. They build their businesses on applying the same technique to multiple different situations (polymorphism), using the same subset of techniques in multiple points of a client engagement (encapsulation), and reusing techniques in multiple engagements for the same client as well as in work for multiple clients (inheritance). They understand the need to respond when you get a call. IT folks call that client/server (C/S). In addition, for those investors who feel an asynchronous bus mechanism such as an enterprise service bus is a mandatory element in SOA, the service industry understands that concept as well. That’s what the dispatcher or senior partner does.

What we heard at the InfoWorld conference was that SOA is following the normal historical path of

ÇÇÇ   © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

SOA is dead — long live SOA

 

 

Page ‐ 3

 

technology adoption. Users will keep experimenting over the next few years, the tipping point should come in 2010 or 2011, and SOA should be considered the status quo around 2015. C/S grew at a similar pace, gradually overtaking the 1960s-era monolithic approach to organizing business processes, applications logic, and data (and the infrastructure needed to support them). For example: •

•

The buzz around C/S started in the late 1980s, but it was the turn of the century before C/S-based packaged apps’ revenue exceeded monolithic packaged apps’ revenue (including annual maintenance fees). In-house-developed C/S apps, based on tools such as Powersoft and Visual Basic, permeated business more quickly but may have never really replaced the base of inhouse-developed monolithic apps.

There is no reason to assume a faster uptake of SOA in making investment decisions, or to be disappointed by its adoption rate. Although we have been talking about SOA for years, the first SOA-based packaged applications are just now beginning to ship. It will be a decade before they dominate application market revenue flows. In addition to the technology challenges inherent in SOA (granularity of decomposition, scale, security, and so forth), enterprises have to deal with their own application ROI/retirement cycles and business issues—such as the timing of new services and products—that have nothing directly to do with IT. Three SOA snapshots: Of the three companies presenting at the Forum, there were some interesting points that might spell investment success or failure for SOA early movers in the supplier community. Amtrak was probably the shortest distance down the tracks in terms of making the transition to SOA, but it is “en route.” In a presentation themed “Heading toward the Light” (hopefully not of a locomotive coming the other way in an Amtrak tunnel), Web Architecture Director Thomas Krotchko spoke of how Amtrak’s need to connect into the OpenTravelAlliance services, schema and standards efforts was a key driving factor.

  © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

 

Earlier enterprise application integration (EAI) efforts had been stymied by Amtrak’s infamous earlydecade budget problems. That turned out to be a plus in terms of moving Amtrak to SOA faster than it might otherwise have done. SOA let Amtrak quickly decouple its growing number of input sources, including its own Web site and station kiosks, from the back-end system. Next, Amtrak will be looking at how to (and whether to) swap out an underlying synchronous backbone with a messaging system without losing required high-availability features. Availability and scalability are issues many users are looking at in terms of dependability before going “big bang” with SOA. As an aside, the existence of organizations such as OpenTravelAlliance, ACORD in the insurance industry, the Open Financial Exchange in banking and finance, and others seems to drive services providers down new technology paths more quickly than enterprises in the product supply chain. Rakesh Kumar and Jun Zhang of the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) division of McGraw-Hill spoke of S&P’s move to SOA, which is taking more of the big bang approach. That is, the pair started with a bus and laid the SOA plan in all at once. Even then, acquisition of many of the pieces is incremental. An interesting twist in the S&P presentation was the company’s introduction of a new IT professional called an “integrator.” This function is different (lower level of the stack) than the business process analyst’s “integrator” role and provides staffers who have “make SOA work” stamped on their foreheads. Needless to say, such a new role required some topmanagement buy-in, always a key to rolling out new IT. The idea could be problematic because, if needed in all firms, the function might be a market inhibitor. But the idea does spell opportunity for the IT consulting community wherever a company does not want to increase headcount. A win-win for users and investors in services companies would occur if the need is temporary, only an SOA implementation issue. The third company, ADP, has to be looked at two ways: as both the human resources/payroll service provider it is well known as and as the application technology provider that it is less well known for. In

 

Page ‐ 4

 

retrospect, ADP was delivering SaaS before the term was invented five years ago (and ASP before that term was invented 10 years ago). From both perspectives, ADP is depending on SOA in a big way. Bob Bongiorno, ADP senior vice president and chief information officer of employer services, outlined how ADP, like Amtrak, used the portal approach to SOA (our term, not theirs) of decoupling the input sources from the backend systems. This lets ADP support its classic basic payroll business service as well as a growing business process outsourcing practice, professional employer organizations (PEO) such as staffing companies, and embedding ADP application technology into other applications such as Microsoft Office accounting (part of the Office Online family) without changing the core application. That might sound like vanilla 1990s screen scraping, but the SOAbased approach involves rich user experiences and the ability to move the processing platform around the net as needed without constantly rewriting APIs and other connectors down to the lower levels of the stack. ADP will then begin to decompose the backend systems to achieve the kind of “true” services orientation described below. Our market analysis is based on the assumption that there will be thousands of such enterprise applications services next decade where today there are hundreds of application modules. Based on its progress to date, ADP is very likely to be a leader in this decomposition/ recomposition process Users don’t have to start with decomposition of existing modules but leading packaged application suppliers such as ADP are likely to. Users can start from scratch the way they did with Powersoft and Visual Basic 10 to 15 years ago. That scenario will become less likely as someone builds a true enterprise applications services “catalog,” but many early adopters will have no choice but to roll their own even while knowing that they are reinventing the wheel. Combined with other user interviews we come away with three findings worth digging deeper into as the SOA trend gains traction: 1) Two of the three users were approaching SOA from the portal perspective rather than a big bang approach. That is true of SAP’s initial SOA implementation of R/3 as well. It is a much more conservative but investment-protecting approach then the way then-ERP-market-leader SSA tried   © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

 

to move to C/S in the early 1990s. To the extent SOA is being rolled out today, prior to SOAbased packaged applications being available in quantity, adoption involves the use of SOA tools and infrastructure. That means it involves decomposing in-house-developed C/S applications, which are now as much as 10 years old at the UI level. Based on this very small sample, concentrating on the UI seems to be a preferred method. One of these users went with the big bang approach of laying in a bus first but the bus is only initially supporting a discrete need as opposed to the whole company. 2) In terms of decomposition, none of the users are really into anything too granular yet. That is true of the packaged application suppliers as well. Oracle announced in May that it is rewriting its middleware and promised EDA/SOA/BPM functionality in that rewrite should support more granularity in the Fusion generation of Oracle applications. In SOA theory, there will one day be—for example—a single universal “city” service that handles address format for customer records in different countries (discriminating among state or province, zip or other postal code, and so forth and “displaying” the result correctly for that country), ties the related address to GPS coordinates to clarify which exact city is being referenced (correctly choosing between San Jose, California and San Jose, Costa Rica for example), and even ties the city to various tax-calculation or other geopolitical-related “services.” In theory, every application will use this “city” service (why reinvent the wheel?) as appropriate. When the service gets updated because a tax changed or a postal code moved, since all applications “call” that one service, what you change once, “runs” everywhere. But the change will also cascade out to any other service that inherited any of its characteristics. An “Address Line” service, for example, that inherited the zip code algorithms would update. In reality however, most enterprises are still trying to figure out who their customers are and to find some way to be sure they are storing each customers’ name, address and phone record in one place. Very granular services such as for each line in a user record are a ways off. 3) There is a historically consistent role for consultants. The three companies were using consultants as well as their own staffs to  

Page ‐ 5

 

implement SOA so there is some hope yet for a BPR reprise among the Accenture’s and E&Y’s of the world What it means to investors: If you combine the historical pace of SOA adoption with what the users said, the infrastructure players and consulting companies are the first to enjoy growth from this market. •

•

The UI or portal-based approach probably favors BEA (BEAS - $12.42), which acquired the leading portal vendor, Plumtree, in 2005. Numerous point solution providers that can make an individual application or component SOA-enabled are also doing well in these situations. Those thinking about more of an infrastructure first strategy, whether it’s an enterprise service bus or something else, will have a broad array of providers to choose from. BEA plays in this space as well as do public companies such as Progress (PRGS— $31.61), Tibco (TIBX—$8.90), IONA (IONA—$5.11) and Software AG due to its recent acquisition of webMethods.

Longer-term, just as C/S-based packaged apps lagged C/S-based in-house development, it will be time to invest in SOA on the applications side. SOAbased packaged applications become a substantial opportunity. So it is very likely that only one real new breakout success will emerge into the existing (highly compacted) pack of application players. Looking at examples from each of the last three decades, who is the SAP (SAP—$47.33), PeopleSoft or Siebel of the SOA era? Some would say it’s Salesforce.com (CRM $45.90), but it’s much too early to make that call. Each functional area (customer automation in this case) tends to produce only one new category leader, and in the case of CRM, Siebel is already associated with that honor. Salesforce.com could just as easily turn out to be Baan. The company that figures out how to market hundreds or even thousands of universal services like the two described above will be the long-term success. Salesforce.com has started to touch this area with AppExchange, but it has yet to be proven. It’s also clear that Oracle and SAP are not standing still as they move toward the same goals with Fusion and   © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

 

NetWeaver respectively. Lastly we are clearly seeing real potential for a Microsoft-centric vision of a services architecture with improving .NET maturity and functionality. As SOA evolves it will change the dynamics of software in a way that looks very different than traditional applications today. Hundreds or even thousands of universal services will combine with others that are customized to create a much more flexible, distributed set of easily accessible services that enterprises will come to rely on. Given how early we are in this game there is only realization in the major players now and plenty of room for some market share shifts and the emergence of a new category leader. – Dennis Byron

ÇÇÇ

Story updates MEMC (WFR—$57): The shares are up about 10% since our note in April regarding our view that it is more than a pure cyclical play on silicon supply. We continue to believe this is a long-term growth story. It was also just announced that WFR will be added to the S&P 500. AT&T (T—$40): Continued enthusiasm for a renaissance of AT&T has driven the shares up 5% in the last month. Our view on the shares continues to suggest a $45–47 range as more investors begrudgingly admit that the iPhone is a positive catalyst for the company. 3Com (COMS—$4.50): We feel more lucky than smart on 3Com these days. The shares have moved up 10% since our note last month. During this time we have received little if any new information supporting the company’s recovery story—which, of course doesn’t mean it won’t happen. However we are research types, so we are taking 3Com off our active story list for now. – Kris Tuttle

ÇÇÇ

 

Page ‐ 6

 

Adoption watch Skype Usage Patterns - (08/07 - 05/07) 10.5

The Web 20

Average

9.5 Concurrent Skype Users (M)

May has been a good, steady month for the Web 20 with the group up about 4%. Gains of 15% and 14% by Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN), respectively, easily offset the 10% drop in WebSense (WBSN) driven by decreasing operating margins.

Peak

8.5

7.5

6.5

5.5

7 ay -0

7

M

M

A pr -0

ar -0 7

07

7

Fe b-

Ja

D ec

n0

-0 6

-0 6

6

N ov

ct -0

-0 6

O

Se p

A ug -0

6

4.5

Date

Figure 2—Skype Usage Patterns

  © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

 

Average

Peak

9.5 Concurrent Skype Users (M)

9 8.5 8 7.5 7 6.5 6

05

20

07 -

07 20

-2 2

-2 0 05

-1 7

-1 5

05

20

07 -

05

05

07 20

07 20

07 -

-1 3

-1 1 05

-0 9 20

07 -

05

-0 7 20

20

07 -

05

05

20

07 -

07 -

05

-0 1

-0 3

-0 5

5.5

20

Additionally this month, on May 13 (which was Mother’s day for all of you negligent sons and daughters out there), Skype ran a promotion that allowed free SkypeOut calling to any worldwide landbased line from the U.S. and Canada. While we don’t have direct access to the percentage of calls that were made via SkypeOut, we anticipated an overall increase in network activity and found there to be exactly no statistically significant increase in either average or peak usage. In fact, in looking at May 13 in Figure 3, it looks pretty much like any other normal Sunday during the month.

Skype - Usage Statistics (May 2007) 10

05

After an unexplained dip in both peak and average usage in April, Skype has returned to growth in May, yet not quite recovering to the peaks it reached in March. On average, monthly growth of average and peak user concurrency has hovered around 4% and 3.5% respectively since we started collecting data in August of 2006. May has shown growth of only 2% for average users and 1.25% for concurrent users.

07 -

Skype

20

Figure 1—Web 20 MTD Performance

While it is important to note that Mother’s Day, while celebrated in many countries across the world, is only celebrated on May 13 in the U.S. and Canada, we still would have expected increased volume across the board. Further investigation found that many of the users attempting to take advantage of this offer either couldn’t make calls, due to a lack of funds, or had credits taken from their SkypeOut accounts. It looked like for each user satisfied with the promo, there was at least one unsatisfied user. Overall, it looks like it was a poorly planned, overly complex, or misunderstood promotion that many users had difficulty using and certainly caused some minor backlash in the Skype community.

Figure 3 – Mother’s Day Effect?

 

Page ‐ 7

 

Also this month, in an effort to further integrate the three disparate eBay platforms (auctions, payments and communications), Skype is now allowing its users to send money to others through Skype via their Paypal accounts. We guess this makes sense in the face of its release of the SkypePrime beta a few months back, their new global expertise marketplace, and we will definitely keep a close eye on the integration as it develops.

Linux Distro Popularity - YTD 2007 Damn Small 5%

Mint 6%

Mandriva 7%

Ubuntu 22%

Sabayon 8%

Second Life The folks over at Linden Labs have made some interesting moves lately that may drive adoption of the platform but cause headaches down the road. Following the open sourcing of their client software, it has subsequently announced its intentions to release the server software under the same unrestrictive GNU General Public License. This could be used both by individuals, who simply want to develop and manage their own public virtual worlds, as well as internally at enterprises looking for new and innovative ways to expand their collaboration platforms without having to worry about the general riff-raff floating around on the publicly hosted servers. Currently, Linden Labs generates a majority of its revenue from the sale of and “maintenance” of private tracts of virtual land. Private, internal corporate adoption could open up a host of new revenue possibilities for Linden, with support contracts and potential custom coding being the most self-evident. Furthering its functionality, Second Life was supposed to be releasing its voice capabilities from beta testing to all users on the grid. While not disclosing any technical details for the hold up, Linden Labs announced that it would keep the voice service in beta for at least a few more weeks and initiate a phased rollout across regions on the grid. Adding voice will make the virtual world a much more natural place for business to occur and potentially speed up the adoption for business users not yet comfortable with the texting that is currently the primary form of communication in the game.

Linux distributions There was little movement in the buzz-rankings of the Top 10 Linux distros this month, with one notable exception. PCLinuxOS, which released its first full,   © Research 2.0 – May 31, 2007 

non-beta version this month, had a 16% increase over last month, jumping from 14% to 16% of the overall distribution pie. These gains came primarily at the expense of openSUSE, which fell from 13% to 11% overall.

 

PCLinuxOS 16%

MEPIS 8% Debian 8%

Fedora 9%

openSUSE 11%

Ubuntu

PCLinuxOS

openSUSE

Fedora

Debian

MEPIS

Sabayon

Mandriva

Mint

Damn Small

Figure 4—Linux Distributions by Popularity

Dell’s continued commitment to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop and SUSE Linux on the server is certainly helping keep them among the leaders.

ÇÇÇ

THE TECHNOLOGY MONTHLY Kris Tuttle, CEO Pete Bishop, Senior Analyst Dennis Byron, Senior Analyst Nancy Hendryx, Chief Editor The Technology Monthly is published by Research 2.0 12 times a year by Blue Caterpillar LLC, 1313 Washington Street, Boston MA 02118. USA Telephone: 617.381.4762. Individual subscriptions by the month or year are $32 and $256 respectively. Some free content is available via email and our blog. Please visit us online at www.research2zero.com. It is a violation of federal copyright law to reproduce or distribute any part of this publication to anyone by any means without permission (often readily provided.) Sponsorships come with internal redistribution rights and in some cases the right to distribute externally to customers and prospects is available. Copyright 2007, Blue Caterpillar LLC.

 

Page ‐ 8