Tuesday, February 27, 2007

EAI results - a mixed bag

Back to looking at financials, a note on Motley Fool that touts Tibco as a "king of cash" reminded me to poke around some of the EAI vendors' financial results.

Tibco's Q4 (ending November 06) was pretty spectacular, with revenue up 20% to $160 million - license revenue growth being a very healthy 32% to $88 million. But earnings over the entire year were barely up; Tibco seems to have a pattern of a huge Q4 after flat Q1/2/3.

WebMethods earnings show license income down more than 10% in Q3 to $19.7 million (total revenues $53.1 million). Motley Fool's article New Product, Same Problem suggests that digesting recent acquisitions (eg Infravio) and restructuring the salesforce are affecting sales.

Vitria's results show a startling spike in license revenue up to $6.7 million up from $1.8 million in the same quarter to Dec 2005 - around half of that accounted for by two customers. Encouragingly, Vitria is in the black.

Finally, BEA takes a bit of a beating - shares down 10% even though revenues were up 15% on same quarter last year. Why? because forecasts are down for next quarter (the analysts wanted $385 million, but management expects only $350-364 million).

A Morningstar analyst rounds it all off in the same news item by suggesting that BEA will get tough competition in the SOA space from Oracle, IBM and Tibco.

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