Intechnology Share Discussion Threads

[big vern] 05/2/2002 11:22

could be ready to go down

[charlie] 06/1/2002 11:02

Remain short this stock.

Series of articles currently appearing in the Daily Mail reminding us what a class one sh1t the company's chairman Parkinson has always been. This is not directly relevant to the company's finances, but I don't think it can help.

Incidentally why doesn't Parkinson hold any shares in the company?
(Rhetorical question!)

[charlie] 06/1/2002 11:00

Remain short this stock.

Series of articles currently appearing in the Daily Mail reminding us what a class one sh1t the company's chairman Parkinson has always been. This is not directly relevant to the company's finances, but I don't think it can help.

Incidentally why doesn't Parkinson hold any shares in the company?

[charlie] 29/11/2001 10:20

No mention of any figures in this contract they've just announced? Incremental revenue?

Unitas "is expected to" recommend VBAK for wider use.....hmmmm.

[charlie] 29/11/2001 10:01

I think I know something.

There appears to have been a single sizeable buyer over the past week or 2....has been a large T trade on the buy side towards the end of the afternoon on several days. But it looks like he's finished now.

[renda2] 22/11/2001 22:57

unless you know something

[byrdsong] 22/11/2001 22:50

mmmmmmmmmm

wonder why.....

I shorted these with no problem all the way down to 100 with ig, but it was no go today. As it happened I was going long on a promising chart and the ig spread quoted was 50% more than it should have been.

It seems to me either you allow shorting or you don't and to proscribe stocks that have been shorted for very good reasons (see above) from shorting seems to me to run against the primary function of a market maker.

[charlie] 22/11/2001 22:12

I see from the traders thread that this stock is reported to be unborrowable at IG Index.

[charlie] 20/11/2001 09:39

Now at a post-results low.

The best thing to do with this stock is to get short and stay short, if necessary for many months, until the price is somewhere near value. This is a lot less than a pound.

[m.t.glass] 15/11/2001 16:34

Turning down at last? Way to go before passing my 159.5p short :O(

[matthewa] 13/11/2001 09:21

Charlie - spoke to house broekr analyst @ WEST LB in fairness he was very good. When we spoek about figures his repsone that these were the statutory figures over a 10 week period as the new company had benn 'erforming' over this time scale. I can see his point but I still don't think the numbers add up. Sent an e-mail to my mate who is a CHartered Accountant maybe he can shed some light.

ITO gone into -ve

[charlie] 13/11/2001 08:50

Best of luck with the broker!

[matthewa] 13/11/2001 08:48

Charlie - I am going to call the hosue broker up as I don't understand the figures either - I am sure they will be happy to explain.

Shorterd more @ £1.85 price dropping now

[charlie] 13/11/2001 08:23

The key point is that the prior year figures are for 10 weeks of trading (for the half-year) and 36 weeks of trading (for the full year).

So for true comparatives multiply the half-year comparative column by (26/10) and the full year column by (52/36).

Alternatively we can subtract columns in the P & L account to give the true figures for H2 (ie a full 6m) last year.

This gives:

Turnover £ 73.9m, was £90.9m, DOWN 19%

Gross profit £10.3m, was £11.6m, DOWN 11%

Profit(loss)before tax (£5.3m), was (£1.4m), Loss increased 3.7x

[matthewa] 13/11/2001 08:00

A foward p/e of over 100?

[charlie] 12/11/2001 21:44

The fourth paragraph from the end of that article looks like a bit like an ITO profit warning.

The rest of the article also seems rather negative in relation to ITO, in particular the number and strength of the competition.

As far as I can see there is no fundamental support for anything like the current price. However insiders own at least 75% so in the short term the price can go anywhere.

[daaawie] 12/11/2001 10:24

Borrowed this from "ONLYAMAN" on III board (I'm sure he wont mind)

SURVEY - FTIT: Spiralling costs hint at a buoyant future: OUTSOURCING by Nuala Moran: The dotcom malaise has slowed the trend towards contracting out, but specialist providers can help enterprises save money
Financial Times; Nov 7, 2001
By NUALA MORAN



Even in these times of economic gloom one corporate resource - data - continues to grow rampantly, challenging companies to find cheaper ways of storing this key asset, protecting its integrity whilst ensuring it remains readily available.

According to some analysts data storage is now consuming up to 60 per cent of the average IT budget, while for data warehousing applications the cost of storage can be as high as 90 per cent of the total system cost.

While he doubts the figures are that high, Jason Rabbetts, commercial director of source consulting, a storage specialist, agrees data storage is chewing up a greater share of IT expenditure.

"It is clearly becoming a strategic concern," he says. "People never considered storage as a separate entity - it was previously seen as a systems cost. But the consumption of data storage has gone through the roof, forcing companies to recognise the need to manage it."

Enter the storage service providers (SSPs), specialist outsourcing companies that offer to host and manage data, for a fixed monthly fee. They claim that much of the cost of storing data is accounted for by the staff needed to manage it, and offer to cut costs by 20-30 per cent.

The market is nascent, but IDC, the IT analysts, predicts buoyant growth, with worldwide storage utility spending showing a compound annual growth rate of 139 per cent between 2000-2005 to reach almost Dollars 11bn. IDC's forecast covers both storage at the service provider's site and equipment located at the client site but managed remotely.

The market was born when the first dedicated SSP, StorageNetworks, was set up in 1998. There are currently 30 or so specialist providers in the US, while Storage Telecom was Europe's first SSP start-up. Recognising the opportunity, companies such as Compaq and IBM launched managed data storage services, as did traditional outsourcers such as EDS.

Other vendors including web hosting companies and application service providers offer data storage as an element of their service, while disaster recovery companies (or "business continuity" as they prefer to be known), are also moving into this market.

Underlying the SSP business model are two technology advances: high bandwidth networks that allow data to be accessed instantaneously regardless of its physical location; and storage management tools that by allowing the virtual separation of different companies' data on the same storage system, offer SSPs economies of scale.

For example, Chris Boorman of Veritas, a storage management software company, says: "It used to be that (Windows) NT environments had to be managed separately from Unix. With our software they can be managed together and share storage devices."

Despite IDC's optimistic forecasts, as yet very few companies have the confidence to outsource data storage, according to Darrell Riddell, head of business development at Synstar, a data management specialist.

"Rising complexity and cost means there are pressures to look at outsourcing, and if companies assessed this just on pure financial terms we would have seen a huge shift already," he says.

But other factors including reliability, performance, scalability and availability, are deemed more important than cost, and the perception is that SSPs are unable to meet all these requirements. In particular, high bandwidth connections must be available between the SSP and the client site 24 hours per day, but SSPs cannot guarantee this level of service because they do not control the networks.

"Rather than relying on availability of bandwidth and whizzing data around the world to a data centre they have never seen, more and more clients are asking us to design, build and operate solutions on site," says Mr Riddell.

Peter Coleman, director of the storage area network provider Gadzoox, agrees outsourcing is not a viable option unless SSPs can offer service level agreements guaranteeing access times and security of data.

"SSPs will have to do this quickly if they want to remain competitive, as storage products are becoming cheaper and many companies are now looking to invest in tailored in-house storage solutions," he says.

Intel Online Services (IOS) was set up by the company two years ago to provide a range of managed services for customers running Internet applications. Jo Watson, head of IOS in Europe, says outsourced storage is becoming a greater proportion of the business.

She believes that rather than outsourcing to specialist SSPs the market is moving towards storage service provision as an offering under an umbrella of managed services from a single provider.

"Customers are faced with a growth in the amount of data they need to store and in the complexity of managing it. And many not only need it to be on tap for their own staff, but also for customers," says Ms Watson.

"We saw a lot of dotcoms last year with potentially large storage requirements. Now we are seeing a lot more traditional bricks-and- mortar clients including banks, airlines and retailers, which are continuing to run their own data centres but outsourcing elements to us.

"The distinction seems to be, if it is mission critical they won't outsource, but for less crucial data they will."

Andy Chudzik, head of Posetiv, an independent storage consultancy, says at present it is mid-sized companies that are turning to SSPs. "Growth in data volumes is rampant and out of control and companies are looking to reduce costs. But large corporations used to running large data centres want to keep data on their own sites," he says.

Mid-sized companies, which find it harder to retain skilled IT staff, may find data management is costing them more per terabyte than it does for their larger brethren.

At present a lack of trust is impeding the market, says Steve Pearce, chief operating officer of InTechnology, a specialist data management company. But change is coming. "You can't just throw more hardware at the problem any more. The costs of disk drives is coming down but the cost of managing data is going up exponentially," he says.

To succeed the SSP offering must become more sophisticated. "We are not just talking about putting data into a hopper. Storage is a black art, and every customer's environment is different. SSPs must have a very focused set of expertise."

Paul Talbut, president of the Fibre Channel Industry Association in Europe (a body that promotes fibre channel as the main storage transport technology), says SSPs had an initial push from the dotcoms looking for a fast-track way to build storage capabilities.

"Their (the dotcoms') demise has slowed the market, but specialist SSPs who understand the needs of enterprise customers will succeed because the cost of storage management is becoming such a huge headache."

Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-1998

[daaawie] 12/11/2001 09:52

Forgot to mention: Super point on the IRA Scum et al.
Shame some people walk around with blinkered brains. Or is it that they have a secret agenda? By the way i dont watch the X Files

[matthewa] 12/11/2001 09:43

Daawie - fair point but ITO is valued at over £150 m and its revnue is just a fraction of this figure.

[daaawie] 12/11/2001 09:41

When Brokers start supporting a stock, then all the fundamentals on a balanace sheet go out of the window. The stocks start to defy gravity to ones amazement.
Seen it many times with many stocks
For eg Cedar: Out of favour with brokers and hence they drop the price by 95% in 2 days, with turnover in xs of 130m and breakeven forecasted for 03/02. Its valued at under 20m

[matthewa] 12/11/2001 09:25

Daaawie - I will be very intersted in tommorows results and will be going over them with a fine tooth comb. Personally I dont think much of this company and WEST LB have been lifitng the price of this company by 6% a day on smallish volume. Check out the balance sheet tommorow and I think you may be in for a shock. WHo knows thoguh I have been known to be wrong.... we shall see

[daaawie] 12/11/2001 08:46

This stock always rises after results are announced and tomorrow will be no exception(Check the charts out for yourself).

Last 5 working days the share has been rising by an average of 7p.
Not for the faint hearted, but if you know how the market works (ie A(whos in the know) tells B who tells C etc) then its not to be missed.