The Dodge Group, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based financial software house formed in 1991, has released its OpenSeries Financials accounting product over a year late. The group, headed by ousted McCormack & Dodge chief executive Frank Dodge, wants to blitz McCormack’s mainframe-based market by offering client-server-based general ledger accounting systems to large multinationals. Scheduled for release at the end of 1992, the product didn’t hit the shelves until the end of last year. The product was late after Dodge ditched Ingres as its database, choosing Sybase and Oracle instead – it is only just completing the Oracle implementation. It also had to write in support for Microsoft Corp’s Open Data Base Connectivity interface. Despite its tardiness, the product has already been sold to Nedcor Bank in Johannesburg for $750,000 and to Sun Life of Canada in Boston, where it is pulling legacy data from an IBM Corp mainframe-based system. Its other customers are the US broker Charles Schwab on the West Coast and Banque Paribas in London. Dodge, which is already being pulled into negotiations with customers in continental Europe, hopes to make $3m by the year ending September 30, growing to $8.5m next year and doubling thereafter. It estimates UK revenues alone at between UKP1 and UKP1.5m this fiscal year. It is currently shipping modules handling General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Asset Management modules, with a Procurement module set to follow soon. Running its server under Digital Equipment Corp Alpha OSF/1, Sun Microsystems Inc Solaris and IBM RS/6000 AIX, the system uses a Windows client, which supports SQL.
