Computron Software Inc must be pleased it got its share offering away last week (CI No 2,736), since it was looking to fund its large investment in research and development, on which it claims to spend 26% of its $33m turnover. The New Jersey-based supplier of financial management, workflow and Computer Output to Laser Disk software for client-server applications, said it has to invest heavily in research and development to keep up with the speed of developments in the industry. The company prides itself on its open software, which integrates with any open third party software, but admits that it has to spend heavily on research to keep up with the pace of change from the likes of Microsoft Corp or Oracle Corp. The company’s philosophy is to help its customers increase efficiency and profitability by providing financial software fully integrated with its workflow product, which allocates work according to the businesses’ own rules and criteria. Computron COOL, Computer Output On-Line, is designed to enable users to view instantly and retrieve any computer output, be it a fax, report, invoice, cheque, all of which are indexed and stored on optical disks and once retrieved can be linked directly to facsimile, electronic mail or word processor.
Open software
The company said COOL extends COLD to laser disk from a microfiche replacement to an archive data retrieval system. In addition to research and development, the company has increased its quality assurance department by a factor of 12, because, John Kerry, newly appointed vice-president of international operations, said, the more open software is, the more factors there are to test. He believes the concept of the beta test site will become much more important in the future, since it will become increasingly difficult for a supplier to test its software in conjunction with the networking software, multi-vendor hardware and all the elements that the customer will have on site in an open, client-server environment. Computron has recently opened its international headquarters in the UK, upgrading its existing sales and support centre in Watford, Hertfordshire, and said it intends to fight its major European competitor, SAP AG, head on. It has won several pieces of international business recently, including contracts with Deutsche Bank AG and TNT Worldwide Express Ltd, as well as a deal worth $8.3m with the Polish State Railways, PKP, in which it claims it went head to head with SAP. Kerry said that the company recognised that to get itself on the shopping list of major corporations, it had to raise its profile and credibility. He believed that Computron’s listing on the Nasdaq market should give the company the that seal of approval, as well as raising funds for future growth.
