IT News in Brief - 1 April

Reuters takes stake in ‘if’

News agency Reuters has acquired a stake in Interactive Forecasting, the London-based developer of if … forecasting software. As well as taking an equity stake, Reuters signed a worldwide agreement to market the if … products, which are designed to help financial analysts and managers to examine the potential effects of different acquisition strategies. The two companies have also collaborated on a new product, ‘if … valuing by sector’. Renaissance from GentiaVersion 3.0 of Gentia Software’s Renaissance Balanced Scorecard program was released last month. The product comes with new scorecard templates to help users get started and links to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It also includes multilingual functions so scorecards can be used and understood within multinational organisations.

Lawson bucks ERP slumpUS enterprise software vendor Lawson has grown its revenues by 39% to $238m for the year to 31 December 1998. Lawson was one of the first vendors to embrace Web-deployable ERP software and has also developed its own performance measurement suite Insight; a new version was launched in the US last month.

Healthy QSP figures Gateshead-based QSP also reported healthy growth in 1998, with profits up 50% to #5.2m on a turnover of #41.2m, up 47% from 1997.