When most Web sites were static brochures, two brothers had a better vision
of the Web – that is, a vision of the Web that is dynamic. The brothers
were J.J. Allaire and Jeremy Allaire. They developed the first Web
application sever for Windows NT called ColdFusion.
Their initial investment was $18,000. It was money well spent. Now, their
company, Allaire Corporation
, has a market capitalization of $846 million.
Of course, Allaire has morphed into a company with a strong suite of
development tools. With ColdFusion, you can develop just about anything:
e-commerce sites, B2B sites, wireless applications and so on. There is also
JRun, which is a Java-based application server. Actually, Allaire had a
major release of this product in the last quarter. The new version supports
the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition specification. JRun has more than
80,000 developers worldwide.
An example of a happy customer is Siemens. One of the companys divisions, the
Communications Network group, has 7,500 field personnel. Critical
to the this group is having a sophisticated intranet that is accessible
anytime, anywhere. Siemens developed its system using ColdFusion
The most recent product announcement is Spectra. Basically, the solution
makes it much easier to build ColdFusion applications. There are modular
and customizable programs for content management, e-commerce and
personalization.
And Spectra is definitely in high demand. After all, companies need
solutions that increase time-to-market.
Since its release in December 1999, Spectra has attracted more than 400
customers and includes FedEx, Palm and AT&T. Since this time, over 70
customers have launched their sites.
Allaire is becoming a solid company financially. In the past quarter,
revenues were $33.3 million, which was a 155% increase from the same period
a year ago. The sequential growth rate was 25%. The company was even
profitable, with net income of $1.8 million.
Of course, the complexity of the Web is accelerating at an incredible rate.
As a result, Allaire has been striking key alliances so as to advance its
technology. One strategic alliance is with Intel, so as to optimize
ColdFusion on the Pentium III Xeon processors. Such technology will
position Allaire for large-volume, transaction heavy Web applications.
What started as a great idea has now become a company that corporate America
relies on for good technology. Like others in its sector, the stock price
has fallen for Allaire — but, in no way has Allaire deviated from its focus
on creating top-notch technologies.
