Acta Technology Inc has won a contract from brewer Guinness for its SAP data warehousing product, a deal which ratifies its launch in the UK. The Palo Alto, California-based company manufactures both RapidMart, an off-the-shelf data warehouse for sales and costing analysis, and ActaWorks, an SAP focused warehouse which retrieves information from SAP cores, transforming it into data which can be tabled and analyzed for business planning.
Guinness will use Acta’s datawarehousing, purchased at an undisclosed price, to gain a global perspective on its assets and supply chain. The contract is an important one for Acta in giving it visibility in its new European marketplace.
The Californian firm also announced that its warehousing and retrieval tools have been made compatible with PeopleSoft’s enterprise resource planning applications. This represents the first move outside the SAP environment for Acta, and is the first step in mirroring the global development of the major ERP players.
Acta plans to offer its products on all the big ERP platforms. We’ll match the ERP market of the world, says Jeffrey Coombes, vice president, marketing for Acta. SAP customers make up over 95% of Acta’s revenue, but Coombes predicts that by next year, 10%-20% of sales will derive from the PeopleSoft installed base.
As well as product extension, Acta is looking to expand geographically in countries outside its North American base. Acta opened an operation in Fleet, Hampshire in the UK in June last year, following it with similar moves in Germany (September 1998) and France (February 1999). After that, north-west Europe is next.
Geographic and ERP vendor targeting are balanced by an increased product line, especially in the packaged decision support arena. Acta offers support for cost and sales analysis, but will also feature further applications in HR, inventory, accounts receivable and payable and procurement. The business process focus will give way to a more vertically structured approach by the end of this year and the beginning of next year says Coombes, as Acta reflects the trend in the enterprise application industry to build apps for specific industries.
Acta is unfazed by the slowdown in the ERP market worldwide. Coombes says that there is an installed base of some 30,000 users. Acta has 60 customers, so the market is still wide open. The company is privately owned, and does not disclose revenue, but its average contract size is around $250,000, which would put revenue in the $15m range.
Coombes said that the company was looking at 2000 for a listing on Nasdaq, depending on market conditions, but before then, there will be a third tranche of funding, worth about $4m-5m, led by US venture capitalist Norwest Venture Partners.
