posted 08-01-2000 07:01 PM         

iXL Enterprises (IIXL): $0.05, $0.09, -$0.54

posted 06-17-1999 09:43 AM         

KITTY PILGRIM, CNNfn ANCHOR, CAPITAL IDEAS: Joining me now with a closer look at iXL Enterprises market debut, as well as what's ahead for the Internet consulting firm, is Bert Ellis who is iXL's chairman and CEO, and thanks very much for coming on the show today.

U. BERTRAM ELLIS JR., CHMN. & CEO, IXL
ENTERPRISES: Thank you, Kitty, good to be here.

PILGRIM: Good day in the markets. You must have been a tad concerned when you saw the market, the turn of the market in recent weeks. What did you think about the pricing process and coming to market in this kind of an environment?

ELLIS: Well, there was nothing we could do about market obviously and we wish we had a better market but we priced at the top end of our range and we had a good day today as you already pointed out so were very happy.

PILGRIM: OK. No complaints right? Let me talk about your strategy. You have just grown by acquisition. You've made 34
acquisitions in a very short period of time and I actually don't know.

ELLIS: Three years.

PILGRIM: Video interactive media companies you just been buying to grow. It that the way you intend to grow further?

ELLIS: No. We made 34 acquisitions over the first two years and putting together the company. iXL, which is a professional
services company. Those acquisitions were primarily to hire smart people. That's what we've used acquisitions for as kind of a mass
hiring if you will. We will continue to use acquisitions again as a way to continue to scale up our company. For the last six months
we have not made any acquisitions and continue to grow fairly well.

PILGRIM: All right. You're in a global business. What exactly do you do for your clients? Who do you see as your competition
which many suggest are companies like Razorfish?

ELLIS: iXL has two principal components. IXL Inc. is a professional services company. We focus on very large client engagements are what we call the e-transformation. Rapid
deployment, continual refinement, a very robust mission critical e-business strategy.

PILGRIM: But you're going to have to put that in English.

ELLIS: What we build are the very sophisticated e-commerce web applications for companies to sell their most critical services to either their business consumers or their retail consumers. And we work with companies such as General Electric and Delta,
Sotheby's and Merrill Lynch are clients of ours through iXL Inc. Were one of the bigger players in that regard. We've got 1400
employees in 20 offices. As far as competition in that the market has gotten so big that their is nobody that we compete with on a regular basis. That's the
opportunity for everybody in this space but you know were we would position ourselves in terms of people that are known in the
business or somewhere else in between IBM and Scient in terms of where we focus on the types of companies. We're bigger than
Scient and IBM is bigger than us.

PILGRIM: But your view is there's so many potential clients out there your actually not competing at this point?

ELLIS: The market is growing so big right now and there's so much demand from the major corporation for Internet capability
now that almost every corporation has discovered the urgent need for it. That it's more a case of having the manpower in order to service the clients.

PILGRIM: You have patent application for your intellectual property rights of your software or your process. Many point to
you your fixed price contracts and say that this might be a problem if there's an economic down turn. What do you say to
that?

ELLIS: Well the patented question is different from the fixed price so you know. The fixed price, about 70 percent of our work is fixed priced and of that we break it down into three phases. So we can of break it down into bite size modules if you will. More and more of our work is time and materials because of the nature of the ever increasing breadth of the Internet applications were building. But if there any type of down turn it's not going to be --
I don't think it's going to be related to the way we price our contracts. And our contracts that we price those modules are three to five months in length in terms of how long they go. So we're breaking it down to components. So I don't see the relationship there. The patent applies to another division of our company called CFN.
CFN is a market maker for financial services. It's a vehicle to allow consumers to comparatively shop and purchase such
financial services as property and casualty insurance and long-term care and mortgages, auto finance. There are two patent
pending process patents for that.

PILGRIM: OK. Well thank very much for coming on the program today and explaining and congratulations on a very good day in
the market. Bert Ellis of iXL Enterprises. Thank you.