RIM's numbers show 140% surge and BlackBerry becomes standard fare

Rethink IT, May, 2004

This is reflected in a valuation less cash of 12 times revenues for RIM and less than one times for palmOne. In August last year RIM was valued at just $1.7bn and Palm $500m and while PalmOne has doubled in value since it organized its split with PalmSource, and acquired Handspring, it cannot match the investor enthusiasm for RIM, which is now valued at S8.5bn.

The next stunning statistic on our table is the 40% plus movement in Adobe revenues since this time last year.

In its first quarter for 2004, Adobe managed revenue of $423.3m, compared to $296.9m last time. Sequentially sales are up from $358.6m in the immediately prior quarter.

Adobe's had only given guidance of $380 to $405m and this must have pleasantly surprised everyone with Adobe stock.

The quarter was driven by the new Adobe Creative Suite but also by its Intelligent Documents business and the company has already raised its guidance for the rest of the year, saying it will do between $1.47bn to $1.5bn with an operating margin between 31% and 32%.

Adobe has, in effect, been trying to turn itself into a full platform for creative professionals by bundling packages together in groups, rather like Microsoft's Office suite, but as the Creative Suite. This also has the effect of making the cost of entry into this market extremely high.

The Adobe suite includes Photoshop, illustrator, InDesign, Go Live, and Acrobat Professional and Version Cue File Manager.

However, the more successful Adobe is with this strategy, the more it will attract the attentions of Microsoft as it realizes that the revenue rewards are worth having.

It is also having a go at the compliance and document management market this year with the launch of a Policy Server, which will be piloted this summer and made available at year end.

The Policy Server will allow viewing rules to persist when applied to documents both inside and outside the firewall, so it works rather like document digital rights, dictating whether documents can be modified, copied, printed or forwarded to other people.

Adobe's CEO has also been talking about entering the marker for paid digital imaging, and is rumored to be building the equivalent of an Apple iTunes for images which can bc sold to creative professionals for download.

Another contrast that we invariably draw in this part of the quarter is that between Cognos and Progress which also report at this time, which both grew out of non-procedural query languages and their associated databases. No more, however.

Cognos is a long term member of the 20/20 club, growing again this quarter by more than 20% while retaining a margin of over 20% (as is Adobe above). Bur Cognos is now considered a business intelligence player, and more lately a tool for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and increasingly reporting.

This is a new direction laid on the company by retiring CEO Ron Zambonini when he took over in 1995, almost 10 years ago now. Zambonini will go upstairs to be chairman in June and his long time right hand man Rob Ashe will take over, already groomed for the role and having occupied the president and COO role for the past few years.