Good thing for Warren Sapp he doesn't run a software company.

Credit Suisse First Boston's Smoking Gun

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has uncovered an incriminating e-mail linking the practice of using research to win investment banking business at Credit Suisse First Boston. The message, dated November 6th, 2000, was from Frank Quattrone to analyst Brent Thrill, who also covers Siebel Systems. In a message referring to Agile Software, Quattrone wrote, "What have we extracted from them on the banking side to get this coverage?".

The content of this message should not come as any big surprise. It has been an open secret for years that many sell-side analysts were expected, as a condition of employment, to support their firm's efforts to get more business from the firms they covered. In theory the practice worked like this; investment bankers would bring an up-and-coming firm to the attention of their firm's analyst following the sector. After careful analysis based on information only available thanks to the bank's special relationship with the company, the analysts started coverage of a company they thought had potential with a strong buy. Investors (many of them day traders) would buy shares in the company, causing its price to go up dramatically. The grateful company would look to the investment bank to lead its next round of financing. All this worked great as long as everyone was making money.

What is surprising is that such a savvy technology banker as Frank Quattrone does not have a better understanding of how e-mail works. In contrast Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank Securities, and U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray each agreed to pay $1.65 million for not saving e-mails.

"Each firm had inadequate procedures and systems to retain and make accessible e-mail communications," the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) said in a joint statement.

Apparently not everyone on Wall Street has forgotten J.P. Morgan's dictum to "speak little, listen carefully, and write nothing down".

Denis Collart at BearingPoint

Denis Collart has been appointed by Bearing Point (NYSE: BE) to be the European leader of its customer relationship management practice and the world-wide leader of its Siebel practice. Collart has been providing CRM consulting for the past 8 years. Prior to joining BearingPoint, Collart was responsible for Andersen's world-wide Siebel practice. Prior to Andersen he created and developed the global CRM practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Collart is a Graduate Engineer from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Metiers de Paris, a Master of Science and a Master of Business Administration of the University of Michigan. After graduating he worked for Northern Telecom, the predecessor of Nortel Networks.

Collart is also a frequent guest speaker at CRM events in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. He is a co-author of the book Customer Relationship Management. He can be reached at 33 (6) 12.78.86.45 or at Denis.collart@bearingpoint.net.

SBI and Company to Acquire Razorfish

Privately held SBI and Company has agreed to acquire Razorfish, Inc. (Nasdaq: RAZF) for $1.70 per share. With 4,835,000 shares outstanding, SBI will be paying a little over $8 million for the New York based firm that was once valued at $2 billion. Following the completion of the public tender offer, SBI and Company will consummate a second-step merger with all the remaining stockholders. In its prime, Razorfish was known as one of the leading firms in the Web design industry. It created sites for AOL, Fox Kids, NBC, PBS, Polygram Filmed Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

"Some of the greatest brands in the history of technology are now a part of this company," said Ty Mattingly, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development of SBI and Company. "After the excesses of the dot com era, the business that is left is good solid enterprise business."

The acquisition increases the size of SBI by adding approximately 200 employees to the 700 that already work for the firm. The acquisition adds clients to SBI's existing installed base. These clients include Avaya, City of Cupertino, Cisco, Legg Mason, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Microsoft, Manulife Financial, GlaxoSmithKline, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, VeriSign, Veritas, and Western Union. The Razorfish acquisition also brings additional expertise building extended enterprise portals to SBI.

Beginning in April of 2001 SBI and Company acquired marchFIRST, Emerald Solutions, Scient, Lante, and Razorfish. iXL was acquired by Scient prior to SBI buying Scient and WebFlow (now Optura) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SBI. For more information about the company, contact Michael Adams 801-492-1479 or madams@sbiandcompany.com.

The deal is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2003.

webMethods offers Universal Application Network product

webMethods (Nasdaq: WEBM), a leading provider of integration software, announced that it is the first company to deliver a product for executing and running business processes based on the Universal Application Network (UAN).

Launched by Siebel Systems, the UAN is a standards-based approach to the design and development of cross-application business processes. The Universal Application Network solution comprises three basic components: (1) a library of business processes, common object models, and transformation maps; (2) a business process design tool; and (3) an integration server to coordinate communication.

The UAN is intended to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of application integration, enabling organizations to deploy cross-application business processes more cost-effectively.

webMethods has built a solution to design and generate Siebel business processes for the UAN based on the WSDL, WSFL, XSLT, and XSD standards. The webMethods integration platform provides a graphical, drag-and-drop interface for modeling business processes, including the transformation and flow of data across multiple applications.

Working together with Siebel Systems, webMethods has jointly developed integration scenarios for order management, availability to promise, shopping cart transfer, and service level management, among other processes. The integration scenarios show interoperability between Siebel applications and applications from vendors.

Founded in 1996, webMethods is headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. The company is also a Siebel Strategic Software Partner. webMethods has more than 850 customers, including Bank of America, Citibank, Dell, Eastman Chemical, Ford, Grainger, and Motorola. For more information contact Andy Savitz, Siebel Alliance Manager, at 408-962-5407 or andrew.savitz@webmethods.com.

Choosing the Right Mobile Solution

There are a number of factors to consider when evaluating mobile wireless enabling software. This article clarifies wireless options, provides a firm ground for decision-making, and gives a realistic perspective on integration issues. To read further, click here.