When the going gets tough…

NEW YORK: It's not every weekend that Neil Lustig arranges to meet a
potential customer in his local diner on New York's Upper West Side.

But for Lustig, a vice president of sales for business-to-business software
company Ariba Inc., this is no ordinary weekend. Like every other software
salesperson, Lustig has just one week left to clinch crucial deals before the
third quarter closes on September 30.

With the prolonged economic slowdown and a virtual standstill in corporate
spending, life in the software sector was tough enough already.

But after last week's attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the
Pentagon near Washington, things have gotten a lot harder. Companies based in
lower Manhattan have been displaced and are scrambling to find new bases of
operation.

Airline services have also been disrupted and many companies are restricting
travel, making it still harder for salespeople to arrange meetings. But Lustig,
a born-and-bred New Yorker, is not complaining. "Luckily I didn't lose
anybody so it makes it a lot easier to carry on," he said.

Lustig said his four-person sales team is doing all they can to be flexible
for customers following the September 11 attacks that devastated the World Trade
Center's twin towers and the Pentagon.

"Nobody would normally impose on the other person to meet on a Saturday
morning in a local neighborhood place," Lustig said. "But you have to
adapt." The team has replaced face-to-face meetings with conference calls,
set up videoconferencing facilities and used instant messaging and e-mail a lot
more heavily than before.

"Everyone's working extra hours," Lustig said.

It is the same story at software companies throughout the United States, as
salespeople desperately scramble to close last minute deals.

"We've been experiencing a lot of delay through the complete relocation
of the financial services industry," Frank Fallon, vice president of
Northeast sales for integration software company SeeBeyond said, referring to
financial firms such as Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers who have had to
temporarily move their offices after the attacks.

SeeBeyond was due to have a meeting with a large financial services firm on
Friday, but that meeting was replaced by a videoconference because the financial
firm lost its offices in the World Trade Center, Fallon said.

"Another phenomenon that we've never seen before is customers giving us
their home phone numbers," Fallon added. "So all of the communication
between the sales reps and the folks we're selling to has been at night, at
home." Sales staff for business intelligence software maker Brio Technology
Inc. were forced to take to the road.

"Our executive vice president for sales has become pretty intimate with
his rental car," Brian Gentile, the company's chief marketing officer,
said. "He drove from New York City to Detroit, and then on to Denver - it
took him the better part of a week."

Alternative means of communications like videoconferencing have become
increasingly popular since the attacks. Brio said it has scrapped a roadshow to
meet analysts, but that the meetings are taking place unabated, through video
and Web conferencing.

Ariba, which was in the middle of its user conference when the attacks hit,
is doing the same thing. Web software company Vignette Corp, which had flown 700
of its employees to New York for the grand launch of its new product last
Tuesday, has now replaced the launch with a conference over the Internet.

"We're doing about a third of our deals that way now," SeeBeyond's
Fallon said, referring to the use of videoconferencing facilities to handle
sales in the New York area. Elsewhere, i2 Technologies Inc. said it has 34
locations equipped with videoconferencing units.

Despite their valiant efforts, software companies are not deluding
themselves. "I think we're going to look at a 15 to 20 percent deferral
situation, there's no question about it," Jim Demetriades, SeeBeyond's
chief executive said, referring to deals that will not get closed as a result of
last week's attacks.

"This environment has made it more difficult than ever before,"
Demetriades said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.