By Nick Patience
Haht Software Inc is a rare beasts these days, an application server company that is still independent. But that’s only half of what the company can offer. Haht (pronounced ‘hot’) has been selling its core web development tool for three years now, having secured a deal early on with SAP AG, whereby it is used to web- enable the employee self-service (ESS) module of R/3. SAP has been our beach head, says chief executive and co-founder Rowland Archer. Of its 450-odd customers, some 135 use it to web-enable R/3 and HahtSite is included on the SAP price list. The latest cut of HahtSite, version 4.0 is now in beta and will ship in March. It includes native support for Java, as well as the existing Visual Basic development support. Raleigh, North Carolina-based Haht has hired Hambrecht & Quist to advise it on a strategy, with a view to going public. Archer says the company has a run rate of just over $10m right now and is grew at 364% in 1998. He’s looking get to about $25m a year before taking the company public. However before that could happen, it might get bought and has already been approached numerous times by big players looking for a development tool and application server, but Haht has so far resisted. With valuations being put on web companies usually in the range of 15- and 20- times revenues, any offer would have to be attractive in that light, says Archer. He says the market may value the application server at the moment, but HahtSite also has what he reckons is the strongest visual development environment around. In addition, in December last year the company began on a new phase of its business that it calls e-Scenarios. In development for most of last year, e-Scenarios are packaged application extensions that offer HahtSite licenses, training and consulting for SAP applications, in particular the sales and delivery module to begin with. Haht signed its first customer in December. It offers training for three people, 15 days of consulting and five development licenses for $175,000. Archer says it represents a new revenue stream and a higher sales point for the company. When Haht spoke to our sister research publication, Internet and Intranet Tools Bulletin (computerwire.com/iitb) in April 1998, it presented a checklist of items it would add to the then-current version 3.1 in the 4.0 release, and it has managed to check off all of them. The ability to develop in pure Java is probably the key addition, whereas previously developers used the company’s own VB clone, HahtTalk. The application server can now also functions as a Corba server, in addition to the existing COM support, this is useful, says Archer for enterprise systems that have multiple types of clients. This was achieved through the licensing of Inprise Inc’s VisiBroker object request broker. The editor now supports all the up to date HTML functions, like dynamic HTML and cascading style sheets and the projects can be split into as many pieces as required and dynamically linked in one session. The Haht application server sits behind the firewall and uses Triple DES encryption, and as the code is all compiled, all a hacker would get back would be p-code, claims Archer. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) support will be added by mid-year. HahtSite supports Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, and Windows NT. Archer is talking to Microsoft about a possible partnership, offering as a carrot the ability of Haht to help get NT into enterprise accounts when combined with web-enabled SAP. Archer says that down the road the company will likely offer what it already does for SAP to Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft, but it would take a large amount of investment, he adds, with one eye on the balance sheet. The last round of funding was completed in December 1997, raising $14.5m, led by NationsBank Capital Investors, Adobe Ventures and Southeast Interactive. Archers says there’s still some of that left and no word on another round just yet. During 1998 Haht added 168 enterprise customers Some of its cust
omers, such as those in the public sector and telecommunications, have tens of thousands is users running of Haht-developed sites. The pricing for 4.01 is the same as 3.1 – $2,000 for the integrated development environment, $700 for the integrated publisher and $7,500 for the application server with a 25 concurrent user license. Additional concurrent users start at $200 each and maintenance pricing is 17% of the total list price for the products.
