'Web-enabled' is the buzz-phrase of the week at the SoftworldAccounting & Finance event at Earls Court in London. Software developersare falling over themselves to offer Web solutions to the profession,writes John Stokdyk.
UK accountants are yet to be convinced. Last month’s survey of accountants in industry by the English ICA and Tate Bramald revealed that only 25% of the accountants questioned used the Internet for business, while 30% of the profession doubted that the Internet would mature into a viable business tool within the next five years. And these were commercial accountants, who are said to be more IT-aware than accountants in practice.
Jyoti Banerjee, managing director of Tate Bramald, commented: ‘The biggest development in the computer industry has not infiltrated the hearts and minds of the profession.’
Paradoxically, Banerjee highlighted statistics that point to a potential shift in attitudes. Two-thirds of the survey sample had access to the Internet, and 10% of the companies claimed to share information via internal corporate ‘intranets’.
The Americans, of course, are much more advanced. ‘In the US, the Web is a minimum requirement,’ said Neil Robertson, managing director for the British subsidiary of Great Plains Software. ‘They’re one or two years ahead of us.’
Based in Fargo, North Dakota, Great Plains Software introduced its new Web-based Dynamics.View and Dynamics.Order modules to the public at Softworld.
On another stand, Lawson Software, whose parent company hails from Minneapolis, was launching Lawson Insight, a financials package that holds accounts data in ‘hypertext’ format that users can interrogate from World Wide Web browsers.
Meanwhile, ICL and Hyperion were promoting the virtues of Spiderman, which makes Hyperion’s applications accessible from within Web browsers.
ICL has adopted Spiderman as a useful addition to its portfolio of intranet solutions. In the upper reaches of the market, Oracle already offers Web-enabled applications and late last year Coda brought in the Internet expertise of Icelandic developer SHS.
‘The methods currently used are ineffective,’ argued Robertson. Accountants send out month-end reports with lots of numbers printed on paper which management don’t read. Browser technology allows you to interrogate the data in an interactive manner.’
The IT consultancy wing of accountants Neville Russell operates as a sole Great Plains reseller and has had an early look at its Dynamics range of software. Chris da Silva, managing director of the consultancy, commented: ‘From a corporate point of view, it offers a very good price relative to the number of users. Users can make direct enquiries to the accounts database and compile reports from low-cost browsers on their ordinary desktop machines.’
Not everyone was buying the hype. Based on regular talks with developers and end-users, IT analyst Dennis Keeling remains a Web sceptic. ‘The Web is a disaster. Developers have invested a lot of money in it, but none of them can produce a single user in this country that has bought into it. It is viable as an alternative interface on the desktop, but it won’t make a difference to the underlying applications.’
For further information visit the following Web sites:
http://www.oracle.com
http://www.gps.com
http://www.lawson.com
http://www.hyperion.com.