Soft-peddling the wares

Last week’s Softworld in Accounting and Management & Executive Information Systems show did not prove to be the goldmine of new products that it sometimes is. But delegates and exhibitors alike appeared to confirm some emerging trends in the market for business and accounting software.

The growing need for better financial reporting, consolidation and budgeting systems has led to several new developments.

Timeline Europe turned up with Metaview, the Excel-based reporting tool they launched earlier this year. And with the difficulty that finance professionals have in managing their planning process showing no signs of abating, two new products have arrived to tackle their budgeting needs.

Walker International and Hyperion Software both had new products for enterprise-wide solutions. Hyperion’s answer is Pillar, the result of a merger with Pillar Software earlier this year.

Hyperion was also showing its Spiderman product, Internet-enabled access for financial managers who want to look at financial data in their Hyperion financial systems. The system provides a common set of user interface tools and allows users to do everything they would at their desktop on the Intranet.

Walker International’s Business Framework Series is a new OLAP (online analytical processing) application for financial consolidation and budgeting.

Tom Fischer, recently poached from Comshare’s financial application’s division, to develop Walker’s new product line, said OLAP was a more appropriate vehicle for building management applications than traditional relational database technology. He added: ‘Most organisations used spreadsheets for budgeting. But they have their limitations, and OLAP is flexible and powerful enough to coordinate and control the budgeting process.’

Walker is now set to go head to head with Hyperion and Comshare and is talking to several non-Big Six consultancies with a view to a partnering programme.

While the budgeting and financial reporting needs were pressing hardest on the corporate-level systems suppliers, further down the chain other buzz technologies are clamouring for FDs’ attention. The second major trend to be felt in the software industry is the increased use of object-oriented technology. OO technology, which claims to be the next ‘big thing’ in accounting software was certainly making its presence felt at Softworld.

But what does it mean?

In short, it means software is developed using separately constructed ‘blocks’ of software, each of which is tested to destruction and works individually. By integrating the blocks, the final software is supposed to work more efficiently.

Chris Cadge, one of Software 2000’s staff, demonstrated Infinium, the company’s latest product. This product is aimed at two different users – the power user who wants the full extent of the tailored product or the occasional user who does not need the full functionality to get the information they want. According to Cadge, object-orientation makes development much easier and quicker. But this has several spin-offs for the end-user.

He said: ‘There are phenomenal benefits during the development stage.

We can also bring out enhancements up to five times faster than with conventional development methods. The code is also far more robust and tested in its individual blocks. All the supplier does is test the putting together.

For users it means that they can have a totally customisable interface where columns or charts appear in whatever order or appearance they want.’

Jeff Ashford, chairman of Time, which supplies TRI-O, a corporate object-oriented system, said a typical objects system could be going live in six weeks.

Other object-oriented software suppliers have emerged from beyond the horizon to take a share, albeit currently small ones, in the UK. Navision, whose financials have been much praised by the likes of the Civil Aviation Authority; and Agresso, currently supplied only by resellers Ampersand and Fraser Williams.

Ian Williamson, Fraser Williams’ managing director, said Agresso was being targeted at project accountants in service companies – a u0.25m deal with facilities management giant FI Group was signed recently, and IT consultants Logica are also users, along with the public sector.

Yash Nagpal of Navision said interest in the UK had proved ‘phenomenal’, and the company was in the midst of signing up several new clients, including the Jersey Electricity Company, Time-Warner, and the shipping company Fred Olsen. Altogether Navision now claims around 45 UK clients.

Another company whose new product could make quite a splash is Pinstripe Software, which launched WinAccs International, an integrated 16 and 32-bit Windows financial solution. Pinstripe’s managing director Robert Childs said the product was mid-range, aimed at companies turning over between u0.75m and u5m. WinAccs has full multi-currency in all ledgers, a report generator and is intended to be easy to implement.

SquareSum also launched a 32-bit NT version of Dream, the system it first installed in 1991. Clients include KPMG’s insurance consultancy division on the Isle of Man, Tate & Lyle and British Aerospace’s pensions and insurance department. Dream has a unified ledger system and the product’s multi-currency functionality was one reason for its choice by Travelex, the currency exchange suppliers which deals in 172 currencies daily.

Comshare exhibited BudgetPlus, a development of its existing budgeting software. And the company went to great lengths to deny rumours that it had been haemorhaging staff. It also stressed that it was now over the accounting debacle discovered in August when sales staff were found to have incorrectly accounted for sales of products which had warranties outstanding on them. Those responsible were sacked and the company’s UK auditors, Arthur Andersen, later gave it a clean bill of health.

But just a day after Softworld ended, Comshare was hit with a writ by Arbor Software, suppliers of the Essbase technology that underpins its software. Arbor claimed that Comshare had ‘committed acts of fraud and breach of contract’, claims vigorously denied by Comshare.

Arbor’s UK marketing director Chris Hill said it was seeking an injunction to prevent Comshare from future distribution of Arbor’s products. The dispute arises over alleged underpayments of royalties, uncovered by Price Waterhouse during a routine audit in the US earlier this year. Comshare’s UK managing director, Michael Coveney, said the writ was issued in ‘bad faith’. He added: ‘We have secretly been in arbitration since early this year. The writ came out of the blue and I can only speculate at the reasons for it. The amount in dispute is $400,000, which is trifling when you consider that in the period concerned we paid Arbor around $14.5m for use of their technology.’

Analysts believe that the writ is a sign of Arbor’s frustration at the pace of arbitration talks. With Comshare now Arbor’s biggest Essbase customer and with few products that can use other vendors’ databases, it is not a dispute either party can really afford to prolong.