Chordiant sizzles in debut

Jan. 2, 2002 4:43 p.m. PT

2 min read

Chordiant Software, Inc (Nasdaq: CHRD) shot up 21 7/16 to 39 7/16 Tuesday in its initial public offering after pricing 4.85 million shares at $18.

The company, whose offering is underwritten by Robertson Stephens and co-managed by Dain Rauscher and Thomas Weisel, changed its trading symbol from CHOR, and now plans to trade on the Nasdaq under CHRD. Shares priced above their estimated range of $14 to $16 a share.

The company resembles Firepond (Nasdaq: FIRE), which did well in its IPO last week, said Kenan Pollack of IPO Central. He predicts that, along with Organic (Nasdaq: OGNC) and webMethods (Nasdaq: WEBM), it will be one of the hottest recent offerings.

The company provides e-business infrastructure software that should enable companies to offer their customers highly personalized marketing, sales programs, e-business services and customer support across multiple communication channels. Chordiant's "Customer Communications Solution," or CCS, integrates customer information from disparate data sources, and automate business processes dependent on a customer's specific profile and request.

For 1999, the company had a net loss $23.1 million on revenue of $17.6 million, compared to a net loss of $17.4 million on revenue of $12.5 million in 1998.

A high concentration of Chordiant's revenue comes from just a couple of customers; for the year ended December 31, revenue from Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corporation and First USA Bank accounted for 30 percent and 19 percent of total net revenue.

The company also has a non-exclusive relationship with Electronic Data Systems (Nasdaq: EDS), a large system integrator and a principal stockholders. In each of 1998 and 1999, over 30 percent of revenue came from customers for whom Electronic Data Systems has been engaged to provide system integration services.

Chordiant competes with several companies, including providers of stand-alone software for Web-based customer relationship management, such as Silknet (Nasdaq: SILK), and Webline and providers of stand- alone e-mail response capabilities, such as Kana (Nasdaq: KANA), Mustang Software (Nasdaq: MSTG) and Brightware. It also compete against traditional client/server-based, call- center service customer and salesforce automation solutions, such as Siebel Systems (Nasdaq: SEBL), Vantive (Nasdaq: VNTV), Clarify (Nasdaq: CLFY) and Pegasystems (Nasdaq: PEGA).