Fashion forecast from Softworld

Major innovations were thin on the ground when the Softworld Spring collection went on show at Earls Court in London last Wednesday and Thursday.

One or two products hinted at new trends just beyond the horizon, but the year 2000 and European monetary union have focused attention on the need for stable products that can cope with these changes right now.

Business-led management reporting was the theme of the Softworld conference held on Tuesday, and many of the new products unveiled over the next two days added weight to the trend. Management reporting means different things to different people, ranging in sophistication from quick and easy print-out options to executive ‘drill-down’ applications and on-line analytical processing (OLAP). What these approaches have in common is the urge to use raw financial data to support business decision-making.

Chorus Information Centre: Barnstaple-based Chorus, for example, introduced Information Centre, an Executive Information System (EIS) integrated with the Chorus accounting suite for IBM’s mid-range AS/400 machine. Information Centre is a Windows client application that sits on top of the Chorus nominal ledger and presents an overview of sales revenues, cashflows, bank balances or any other salient information managers needed to assess the current state of their business.

Chorus targets companies with u10m to u50m annual revenues and has remained faithful to the middle-brow AS/400 while others have jumped on the client/server bandwagon. Chorus commercial manager George Rourke says Information Centre came about as a response to client/server. ‘Many users think that client/server means they have a PC with the Windows interface on their desk. They don’t care where the processing is located.’

Application interfaces within Chorus make it possible to link the accounting and EIS packages into other functional systems or character-based legacy installations. In effect, says Rourke, Information Centre can turn the Chorus hub into a basic data warehouse for users with mixed environments.

Typical costs for the EIS module are u1,200 to u3,500.

Coda-Financials 5.0: In terms of trendiness, Coda-Enterprise stole the show. Offered as a module for the Windows NT-based Coda-Financials 5.0, Coda-Enterprise is a set of object-oriented business tools that let managers define and manage workflows, set up financial alerts when key financial indicators exceed their limits, and publish and retrieve financial information via the Internet.

Object-oriented is one of the buzz-words de jour, but the Internet functions are what confer true cool on the once staid Coda. Coda-Enterprise contains the basic building blocks to construct an accounting intranet using Internet protocols. Reports and data tables can be automatically translated into World Wide Web documents, or transferred directly to another user as a self-contained file. The alert messages, too, can be raised by Coda-Enterprise and delivered to the relevant people by electronic mail.

As an example of how the Web could benefit the accounting profession, Coda executives showed how it could be used to retrieve client credit information from the Dun & Bradstreet Web site, or to refer to currency exchange rates on-line at the very instant that a transaction is recorded.

Coda-Enterprise emerged from Coda’s acquisition of Icelandic software house SHS last November. ‘Coda had plans to move towards object orientation and the Internet and we needed workflow capabilities in the market. SHS gave us the opportunity to buy in those technologies,’ says Coda marketing manager David Turner. ‘Time to market is the crucial factor.’ Coda has yet to set prices for Coda-Enterprise.

ICL Financial Igniter Pack/ Hyperion Spider-Man: With technology moving so quickly, takeovers, partnerships and software licensing deals are all the rage as vendors jostle for market leadership. The Financial Igniter Pack is ICL’s statement of intent to deliver intranets to the accounting community. The pack combines ICL’s consultancy and integration expertise with consolidation and financial management applications from Knutsford-based Hyperion Software.

Once again, the focus of the Ingiter partnership is on extracting and delivering financial data that can be used as performance indicators for the wider business. The relationship gives Hyperion the support of a large, well-known sales organisation with major corporate clients. The key product to the new relationship is Hyperion’s Spider-Man, which sits on top of object-oriented application components that access underlying financial systems.

‘For a small, incremental investment, an intranet can have a significant impact on the business,’ says ICL’s Andy Irvine. ‘We are going beyond the idea of simple publishing on the Web to deliver real business benefits.

It’s a global technology with low implementation and maintenance costs.’

If a company already has the right internetworking infrastructure, the Igniter Pack can help them get an intranet up and running for around u40,000 to u50,000.

Lawson Insight: In another partnership to deliver Web-deployable business analysis and management reporting functions, Lawson Software introduced Lawson Insight, which is built on top of the Essbase OLAP Server from Arbor Software. Lawson’s new Information Delivery Framework is a mechanism to link its suite of financial and business management programs with relational databases such as Oracle, Sybase and Informix and ancillary tools such as Essbase’s ‘hypercubes’, which allow analysis of data from multiple sources. The target market is among companies with u15m annual turnovers and the packages are available for Unix and Windows NT hardware.

JBA AIMS: Elsewhere, JBA launched Advanced Information Management Solutions (AIMS) and Activity Based Costing modules for its System 21 client/server financial and business management suite. Once again, the emphasis is on extracting business insights from the latest transactions in the IT system.

Presentation is everything

As in the fashion world, the elaborate confections presented at Softworld Spring were not necessarily the finished products an ordinary customer would want to buy for their company.

Disconcertingly, many of the ‘demonstrations’ were canned animations and PowerPoint slideshows. Potential customers might have been able to get a good feel for different software styles, but the exhibition should be treated as an introductory first step rather than final expert guidance.

As the masterclasses advised, anyone thinking seriously of buying should pay particular attention to researching, specifying and testing prospective systems before taking out their wallet and parting with any hard-earned cash.