Categoric Software Corp, a Palo Alto, California start-up, has added features to its business information alerting software which it expects to boost revenue of $700,000 last year to $12m in 2000. If the company meets its targets, it plans to apply for an initial public offering within 18 months.
Version 3.6 of Categoric’s Alerts monitors activity against corporate databases, and notifies designated staff of critical changes, either via email, electronic data interchange, by phone or by fax. Categoric has reworked Alerts into Java, Visual Basic and C++ components, making it easier to distribute the product across multiple servers, and increasing its ability scale to meet very high volumes of activity. Alerts also supports extensible markup language (XML) for easier exchange of information across the internet.
In line with the current trend for offering software functionality as a service rather than as a packaged product, Categoric is marketing Alerts-based applications to company’s on a pay for use basis. An airline, for instance, could subscribe to the Alerts service, using it to automatically contact its most valuable passengers, warning them of delays or offering to automatically inform them of changes in seat availability via any internet-connected device, or over an ordinary phone network.
Alerts 3.6 also adds load-balancing and failover facilities, and sees a switch, in the interests of increased stability, from Microsoft Access as its underlying database engine to Oracle. It will also support LDAP (the lightweight directory access protocol standard), so users don’t have to write out their address books again for the Alerts software.
Categoric has signed a number of OEM deals, banking on the indirect sales model to win business in specialized areas. Artemis Management Systems will focus on project management, American Software on the enterprise resource planning market, Optum on supply chain management and OI Synform Groupe Focal on logistics software customers.
Categoric’s software now works with the software of these firms. In theory, says chief technology officer and co-founder Safi Captan, any application will be able to trigger an alert. Prices will start around $41,000 for a system sending messages to 50 users. The firm has sold almost 50 Alerts systems so far, but says it expects to multiply that figure by 5 in the next six to twelve months.
