Scient To Set Up Shop In Boston, eBriefs Beantown

Following its announcement that it would open an office in Boston, Scient Corp., San Francisco, held a day-long eBriefing here Thursday to introduce itself to potential clients and recruits and to discuss the "Scient Approach" of doing eBusiness.

More than 100 attendees, ranging from "dot com" start-up company executives to analysts and local university students, gathered downtown at the Lenox Hotel to hear Scient COO Stephen Mucchetti, chief marketing officer Christopher Lochhead and head of its electronic markets practice Lawler Kang, discuss various aspects of eBusiness and how Scient delivers solutions.

Sounding more like analysts, and with presentations that would have been at home in a Harvard Business School seminar, Scient executives illustrated the business behind eBusiness. Lockhead kicked off the event by talking about the opportunities and scale that eBusiness carried. According to Lockhead's research, some $7.6 billion in venture capital funding went to start-up companies in the second quarter of the year, a 77 percent increase over the same period last year. More than half of that money went to fund dot com companies.

During his lively presentation, Lochhead asked the audience to stand and shout, "We're on fire!" as loudly as possible. The audience obliged. More to the point, reporting 75 percent quarter over quarter revenue growth, Scient is on fire.

Lochhead and Mucchetti are bullish on eBusiness, and they're not afraid to say so.

"Remember the movie 'The Amityville Horror?' Remember how the house told its new owners to 'Get Out'?" Lockhead asked the crowd. "Well, if your CEO is only now thinking about eBusiness, it's time for you to 'Get Out!'"

Attendees liked what they heard, for the most part.

Ivan Chang is building an "info-related eBusiness using the Internet for efficiency," and was evaluating Scient along with others, such as Zefer and IXL for his start-up. Change said he "wasn't sure" how different Scient is from some of its competitors, but liked what he heard.

Najib Elhajj, building an Internet start-up in Boston, came to the event to evaluate Scient for his own company. "I like Lawler [Kang] very much. He was very objective and pointed out the milestones to going eBusiness," said Elhajj. But he was concerned about the young company's experience. "I like their approach, but they lack some experience from what I heard today. I didn't like the marketing approach--it didn't cover too much of the business-to-business aspect. It was more about business-to-consumer," said Elhajj.

Mucchetti says that the problem for many established companies looking to move their brands to the eBusiness world is that the normal metrics for measuring business success do not apply in the eBusiness world.

Mucchetti lectured the audience on the "tyranny of ROI" as it applies to eBusiness and gave the crowd a lesson in converting market caps into "real" assets by pointing to WorldCom's purchase of MCI as an example.

"If you were Amazon.com and you were sitting on its market cap, what would you do? Maybe, you'd take a look at Wal-Mart and some of the other retailers going eBusiness into your space and you'd have a little fun. Maybe you'd buy Sears," Mucchetti postulated. The audience laughed, but stopped, thinking that maybe he's right.