Mr. Joy: If you go back to our roots, we are a 34-year-old information technology company, founded by a group of engineers out of Brookhaven Labs. We were best known for the ADDS brand when we were Applied Digital Data Systems, and were one of the leading innovators and growth companies in the video display terminal marketplace, eventually acquired by NCR in 1981. Subsequent to that, AT&T acquired us via the NCR acquisition, and in 1994, the company was spun off by AT&T and eventually became the stand-alone Boundless Corporation. Today the company is in three businesses. There is the core video display terminal business, which although it is a declining market, it's still alive and well, and we are, as far as we know, the market leader therein. Second, a sort of subset of that marketplace, is point-of-sale or point-of- service. To be more specific, the company has some proprietary solutions in that marketplace and is having some great success with some of the best-known food and service chains in North America. And then third, we are a services company. We provide assembly, test and distribution services for configurable technology products at the system level, and we also provide warranty and after-market repair and technical support for technology products. This complement of services is referred to as our EMS business (electronic manufacturing services). So those are the three businesses we are in today.
TWST: When you look at the competition in those markets, what's the
differentiator? Where are you strategically pointed and what's the
outlook?
Mr. Joy: Video display terminals, although declining, will last for
quite a few years yet to come because of the solution's 'perfect fit'
for certain business problems. When something works well, people are
really hesitant to let it go. Our differentiators are that we are the
only character-based information appliances company building in North
America, which puts us closer to our customers and their markets in the
Americas and Europe than the alternatives manufactured in the Far East
and India. Our customers don't have to load up on inventory as we can
build and deliver 'lot-size-one' on a just-in-time basis. We also
deliver a higher level of customization and can tailor the product to
suit the customer's specific environment, which is something no other
competitor in our marketplace does. Point-of-service solutions have many
of the same characteristics as the general purpose VDT marketplace. The
high reliability and ease-of-use of our products, the centralized
control and remote supportability of Unix/Linux environments, and our
BTO assembly, logistics and support services capabilities serve both
markets equally well. When you are servicing a customer such as
McDonald's or Pearle Vision or anyone with a great number of locations
over a broad area, you are not delivering a standard product to a
central location. The units go out to tens, hundreds, even thousands of
locations and being able to tailor products and ship them right to the
destination saves everyone time and assets. This capability also applies
to our EMS business. Our differentiator in EMS is our 'lot-size-one,
drop ship anywhere in the world right to your customer's customer'
systems orientation. We do things at the system level where most EMS
providers are still below that, and again the things we had to develop
to serve our product customers, we are now applying to a broader market.
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