Software chief sees growth

By ADAM GIFFORD

The new New Zealand manager for manufacturing software specialist Systems Software Associates (SSA), Roger Phare, only took the job because he believed the company has changed enough to survive in today's tough systems market.

Mr Phare came to the job after two years as sales and marketing manager with local software engineering company Olympic. Olympic sells products like JBA, Sun Systems and Great Plains into the mid market as well as developing e-commerce solutions in the Microsoft environment.

Before then he worked for eight years for IT companies in Brisbane.

SSA lost millions trying to convert its BPCS manufacturing software to run on other computers than the IBM AS/400. A new chief executive, Bill Stuek, scrapped most of that work and made the Chicago-based company concentrate on AS/400, HP Unix servers and developing templates so it could quickly integrate third-party products into the BPCS backbone.

"SSA is not an ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor any longer, it's an industrial solutions vendor," Mr Phare says.

"It still puts huge resource into its core BPCS manufacturing system, but its view of the world is if it is to be a true solutions provider it should put resources into the industrial sector through partnerships and what have you, to pull it all together.

"A number of deals we are working on in new sites do not involve BPCS, but Corvu [an Australiandeveloped business intelligence system] and other planning and optimisation tools. But the customers are in the industrial sector and they do involve our project management and other expertise.

"Our approach is to take responsibility for delivery of the third-party products," Mr Phare says.

He says that while ERP promises to provide completely integrated end-to-end solutions, customers tend to take bits which suit their business and add other products on top.

SSA New Zealand has 20 staff and another six contractors.

Staff numbers and revenue have been flat over the past year, as the ERP market lost momentum while companies readied themselves for Y2K.

The company is taking on staff as it looks to the year ahead.

"We're looking at 50 per cent growth in revenue," Mr Phare says.

"BPCS should account for 25 per cent and the rest should come from services and commissions."

He says customers are interested in the strategic benefits of IT.

"If you look at where ERP has been coming from, it's a lowest common denominator view - increase the efficiency of the process, cut costs. Now firms want to know how they can grow customers and revenue and benefit their customers' customers."

Mr Phare says there is still plenty of life in the AS/400 market. Microsoft will hate him, he says, but it takes a lot to keep NT and SQL server running.

"The AS/400 is expensive but you turn it on and it goes forever."