BackWeb's American offices are in San Jose California. However, the
research and development is carried out in Ramat Gan, next to Tel
Aviv.
The company's goal is to become a leading provider of Internet
communication infrastructure and is getting support from the growing
number of blue-chip customers which include Ericson, British Telecom,
Lucent, Jeffries & Co., Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Telenordia and
Nortel.
Among the users one finds BancBoston Robertson Stephens which served as
underwriter for BackWeb and whose top rated analyst is John Powers,
whom we met recently on his visit to Israel when he delivered a key
presentation at the Robertson Steven's Evergreen Technology and Growth
Conference.
On June 6, a short four years after its founding BackWeb completed a
highly successful Initial Public Offering (Nasdaq:BWEB). The issue was
priced at $12 on the first day its priced soared by more than 80% to
$22. Since its IPO nearly six months ago the shares reached a high of
$44.
Since 1998 revenues have been on an upward trend with total revenues
rising from $1.6 mln to $6.2 mln in Q3 1999. Robertson Stephens
analyst John Powers projects the trend to continue and estimates that
in Q3 2000 BackWeb's sales will exceed $10.1 mln and profitability will
be reached that same Q3 2000. The analyst's estimate is that revenues
of $22.3 mln in 1999 will jump to $39.3 mln for FY2000.
BackWeb is part of of a rapidly changing market and following a
market shakeout leaves only Marimba as an active competitor.
Notwithstanding market and competitive vagaries BackWeb offers an
exciting investment opportunity and appears to have long-term appeal.
We first mentioned BackWeb Technologies in our report in 1998. We
pointed to it as a startup which developed an interesting technology
that updates content which is distributed automatically to Net users.
The way this works is that a Web site provider installs the BackWeb
Channel server software, which then communicates with users who have
the BackWeb software installed on their PCs. The channel server sends
users content in "Infopaks" which may contain HTML pages, video or
audio files, software programs, Java applets or Netscape plug-ins. The
technology known as "push" delivers content when not using the net
connection. From this basic functionality BackWeb has developed a
platform for priority information delivery over a network. Typically
users receive a mass of e-mail and other electronic files. BackWeb's
software offers a way whereby important information is delivered in a
manner that captures the recipient's immediate attention.