Visio Corp, the drawing and diagram software developer set to be acquired by Microsoft Corp, expects to sign up thousands of new users who it says have held off buying drawing software until the release of the Enterprise and Professional editions of Visio 2000. Guy Tweedale, European product marketing manager, predicts that the Seattle firm would enroll 100,000 users for its Visio 2000 Enterprise software in 12 months, and 200,000 for the Professional edition to add to its three million strong global customer base.
The Seattle, Washington company’s fourth quarter results fell nine cents below First Call analyst earnings per share estimates last month and Visio blamed the shortfall on deferring customers and cautiousness prompted by the Microsoft takeover (CI No 3,779). There was a little bit of uncertainty last quarter, Tweedale said. Japanese, German and French language versions of the two software products are scheduled for the end of the first quarter next year when the Microsoft deal should be completed, pending Department of Justice checks and Visio shareholder ratification on December 13.
Visio 2000 Professional Edition, costing $399 per user, links to IBM, Oracle, Informix, Sybase and Microsoft databases, allowing it to provide schematic representations between data items in the RDBMS systems. It can also show the hardware and interconnections in networks and represent employees given group privileges in Microsoft’s Active Directory, due for release along with Windows 2000 next year. The software is intended for departmental IT staff and for consultants for small systems integrators.
Visio 2000 Enterprise Edition costs $995 and adds editing to the documenting features of Professional, enabling administrators to make changes to database structures from a visual representation or rework the make-up of Active Directory. Enterprise also supports the unified modelling language.
Visio claims its two software products will fend off competition from Richardson, Texas-based Micrografx Inc’s NetCharter Pro, priced at $1000, because Visio’s library of 18,000 pre-drawn components is more than three times larger and because Enterprise can give greater detail on the individual parts of a network, such as identifying the manufacturer of a router.
Microsoft announced the acquisition of Visio, for which it is expected to pay around $1.3bn in common stock, in September (CI No 3,748).
