Acta Technology Inc, having targeted the enterprise resource planning market with its data extraction tools, says it is turning its attention to the e-commerce sector. Acta’s ‘ecache’ enables SAP R/3 customers to check the status of their accounts and find out the payment dates of their invoices by email and browser rather than hanging on a telephone. Acta says it will develop the technology for other ERP systems in mid-2000, although it didn’t say which ones. The Palo Alto company will release more modules in the first quarter to enable SAP users to check where their order is and allow firms to show and sell products online.
Acta claims that ecache will reduce ERP workload by 95% because it stores the relevant ERP information separately. The company also says that because ecache is pre-configured, it will save 75% in deployment costs. ecache will cost around 40,000 pounds ($64,800) to 50,000 pounds ($81,000) per module on top of the ActaWorks data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) server, which costs between 100,000 pounds ($162,000) and 250,000 pounds ($405,000) depending on the number of data repositories it extracts from and data targets it sends information to.
Customers for ecache are traditional companies looking to improve their e-commerce offering by making better use of their existing data, as well as companies distributing relevant data to extended customer and supplier chains. Ecache runs on Windows NT and the AIX, HPUX and Solaris Unix versions.
Acta says it has attracted interest from large IT firms hoping to OEM the technology for portals. The privately-owned firm says it is in talks at the moment with a number of portal players and expects an announcement very soon. Any likely partnership will involve a reporting tool vendor to bolt a front-end onto Acta’s data extraction tool. Acta already has partnerships with business intelligence vendors including Brio, Hyperion, Business Objects and Microstrategy.
