Intentia International AB, the Swedish specialist in second tier enterprise resource, yesterday brought its Movex products to Unix for the first time, adding IBM AIX 4.3.3 support to its current IBM AS/400 and Microsoft Windows NT platforms. The Stockholm company said that Movex for AIX has also been groomed to integrate with IBM DB2 6.1 back-ends, and promised to extend its new Unix support to Monterey by fall of next year.
Intentia’s earlier reluctance to embrace Unix can hardly be said to have held it back. From the relative security of its small home market, the Swedish company has recently emerged as a potential heavy-hitter, albeit exclusively in the second tier ERP market for small and medium-sized enterprises, and in a strictly delineated set of vertical sectors.
That strict vertical delineation is a key differentiator for Intentia, according to founder and CEO Bjorn Alqvist, and has seen the company build a global customer base of 2,600, while growing revenue at an average 44% for the past five years. It now claims to rank third in the European ERP vendor league, and eighth worldwide.
Speaking at the launch of Movex for AIX in Cannes yesterday, Alqvist said the effort to globalize the company’s reach over the past five years has been expensive, but the light of profitability is already in sight. We have paid a very high price said Alqvist, citing the $20m loss that the company has accrued in the first three quarters. But the company is set to break even in the fourth quarter, and to achieve profitable margins in the US thereafter, he said.
It is the company’s recent expansion effort in the US that has splashed most red on the balance sheet. In the last 12 months the company, which insists in leading the implementation process for its products rather than farming this effort out to third party consultants, has recruited 200 skilled staff in the US. Many of these have been picked up from ailing competitors, such as SSA, which has also proved a rich sales opportunity for the 54 sales staff that have joined Intentia in the US this year.
The company is planning to continue its international expansion, especially in Asia where its existing Australian operation is now starting to contribute strongly, and which will soon be followed, said Alqvist by operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and, ultimately, China. However, Alqvist stressed that the growth will not be pursued beyond what can easily be accommodated. He is aiming to run the company at between 30% and 40% per annum growth for the foreseeable future, although in some instances, such as America, local markets will exceed this rate in the short-term.
Such thinking is in line with AlqvistÆs overall philosophy that balance and focus are key features of a healthy business. But despite this, there is an air of expectation about Intentia’s ambitions which suggest it might easily outgrow its own predictions. In particular, Alqvist’s insistence that the company’s technology, with a client that is significantly thinner than our competitorsö, is perfect for e-business applications, suggests that he may be tempted to surf the e-commerce Tsunami, even if it does invite the company to run faster than planned.
As Alqvist himself pointed out in Cannes, if all of Intentia’s existing customers were to spend as little as $2m in e-commerce extensions to their Movex investments, the company would realize sales of between $3bn and $6bn over the next five years. That is a much bigger prospect than the 40% year-on-year growth Alqvist promises against last year’s revenue of $313m. But, if the company does stick to its strategy and cap its own growth, who then will reap the riches of Intentia’s own potential e-commerce systems market?
Alqvist promises that a series of partnerships already in the pipeline will keep its larger tier one competitors at bay. But they will have to be powerful partners to do that.
