Company description

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:13:10 GMT

BroadVision, Inc. develops, markets, and supports enterprise portal applications that enable companies to unify their e-business infrastructure and conduct interactions and transactions with employees, partners, and customers through a personalized self-service model. It offers Business Agility Suite, a portal that provides personalized views of information and processes; Commerce Agility Suite, an e-commerce system for transacting business on the Web; Clearvale, an enterprise social network solution; Clear, a human resources management system; QuickSilver, a publishing system for large and complex documents; and Vmoso, a cloud application for conducting virtual enterprise communications, mobile workgroup collaborations, and social business engagements. The company also provides frameworks that offer portal services for organizing and presenting information; commerce services for transacting business on the Web; process services for transforming people-intensive processes and collaborations into Web-based self-service applications; content services for managing Web content throughout its lifecycle; staging services for moving content from development environment to production environment; search for full-text and field searching of online content and referenced external files with relevance ranking; unified stream services for unification and integration of information; notification/push services to deliver notifications through various messaging platforms; and migration services for data moving across platforms. In addition, it offers business consulting, implementation, integration and package, upgrade and migration, and performance tuning services; education, and support and maintenance services; and Vmoso and Kukini developer toolkits, and Kona framework, as well as Vmoso Enterprise Transformation, a proprietary implementation approach for the Vmoso collaborative solution. The company was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California.

Research

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:02:39 GMT

On Wednesday, March 25, BroadVision, Inc. (BVSN) announced a partnership with Vmoso and the start of their new Telework Jumpstart Program (TJP), which sparked a 139.5% surge in the stock price over the last two trading days. We want to examine if this recent movement is justified and inform our clients of our findings.

https://vmoso.com/news/tjp-announcement/

This announcement describes BVSN as, “a leading provider of e-business management solutions,” and Vmoso as, “a global provider of enterprise digital hub technology for workplace collaboration, customer engagement, and personal data management.” Below is a description of the services the company provides which we see as an overly glowing marketing sales-pitch for what most would expect from a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) provider.

“Vmoso supports all aspects of digital work, which would otherwise require a disparate set of tools, leading to fragmentation, confusion, and deteriorating productivity”, explained Yun-Ping Hsu, General Manager of Global Operations at BroadVision. “By unifying social collaboration, file sharing, task management, knowledge management capabilities, together with email and teleconferencing integration, Vmoso users can get more work done with less, at any time, from anywhere, while turning today’s conversations into tomorrow’s knowledge, automatically.” Hsu continued, “Vmoso is not only a compelling alternative to Microsoft Teams and Slack, it provides a superior collaborative knowledge platform as a holistic all-in-one solution.”

BVSN offers Vmoso’s TJP services free for 12 months. While BVSN is promoting its TJP as a new initiative, it appears that BVSN is simply repackaging the same Vmoso services under the new TJP name. It is also possible the company may simply be giving away its services to try to attract users with the hopes of converting some into paid customers (see image taken from https://app.vmoso.com/ ).

In its press release, BVSN describes its TJP services with Vmoso as a “compelling alternative to Microsoft Teams and Slack.” Slack had over 12 million daily active users (DAU) as of October 2019, of which only a fraction, 110,000, were paying customers. Microsoft Teams has recently reported a record surge of interest in Teams, which saw its DAU jump from 32 million to 44 million in a single week from March 11 to March 18 of this year. Microsoft Teams also boasts 500K paying customers. For both Slack and Teams, their paying customers to DAU average about 1%.

We do not know how many DAU BVSN achieves through Vmoso nor the number of paying customers. However, we did find that it appears that BVSN’s Vmoso has been able to attract very little interest over the last five years. The Vmoso app has seen only four reviews in the last five years on Apple’s App Store, and only 1000+ installs ever from Google Play (see images below). This is hardly what we would consider a “leading provider” in the UCaaS space. Assuming all of BVSN’s 1000+ downloads from Google Play are DAU and its paying customers to DAU ratio is on par with Slack and Teams, Vmoso would literally have tens of customers. This is not a company we see as a “compelling alternative” to other UCaaS providers, much less industry leading Microsoft Teams and Slack.

Altigen (ATGN) and Crexendo (CXDO) are two companies we follow in the UCaaS space. Both of these companies provide unified communications solutions to their corporate customers, both have seen increasing revenues, both are profitable, both are well positioned to dramatically expand their customer bases, and both have tremendous upside potential.

Conversely, BVSN has seen steadily declining sales with its total revenues decreasing by about 50% over the last five years to around $3.0 million. BVSN has not seen a single quarter of profitability within the last five years other than Q3 2019. While BVSN did achieve positive net income in Q3 2019 of $1.663 million, this was the result of a one-time sale of discontinued operations for $1.684 million.

Given BVSN’s steady decline through the last five years of one of the greatest bull-markets ever, we believe that BVSN is not well positioned to truly take advantage of the upcoming expansion in the UCaaS space. The company’s March 25 announcement appears to be a publicity stunt to bring relevance to an irrelevant player in the industry. In doing so, they reveal the truth of their situation: they are giving away for free a service that not many appear to be willing to pay for. We think the recent 139.5% move in the stock price is reactionary. To us, this has all the signs of a classic pump and dump scenario playing out. We doubt BVSN will be able to achieve corresponding increases in revenue or net income as a result of its free Telework Jumpstart Program. We will continue to follow this company to see if they are able to convert any of their newly acquired free customers into paying ones and if recent shareholder activist interest results have a chance in achieving a positive outcome.

Pump and Dump Watch

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Stock is rising on social media hype and pumping activities by Jonathan Lebed. The company has lost money for 3 quarters in a row and revenues have been in a steady decline for 3 years.

BroadVision, Inc. (BVSN) research, news, and more from GeoInvesting

Company description

Research

Pump and Dump Watch