Pegasus Group Plc, the accounting software company from Kettering in the UK is ready to start expanding its horizons with a brand new suite of Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT based modular software products. The group has produced a positive set of interim results, with net profits for the six months to June 30 up 108% at 850,000 pounds on revenue that rose 49.3% to 5.6m pounds. CSM Ltd, purchased in April from cash strapped display makers Microvitec Plc for 6.5m pounds, has contributed nearly 1m pounds to revenue with associated losses of 66,000 pounds and Pegasus is in the process of converting CSM’s accounts preparation and taxation products from MS-DOS to Windows in an effort to turn the company around. But the real news lies in what’s bubbling under the surface with Pegasus’ own products. Chief executive Jonathan Hubbard-Ford admitted that the group has been playing catch up since the late eighties, and now in the time honored tradition of software development, Pegasus has speeded up the process by abandoning its own efforts and snapping up somebody else’s. Pegasus is building a brand new modular accounting software suite, as yet unnamed, and based on a part finished project originating in Denmark. Written in Visual Basic 5.0, the new software is designed to run on Window 95 and Windows NT in the client/server arena. The price will be similar to the current flagship range of Opera software but the client/server aspect should make the new product more appealing to the larger businesses which tend to overlook Pegasus at present. The new suite will also be as EMU compliant as the company can make it in the run up to a proposed June 1998 launch date, including currency conversion via triangulation through the Euro. Additionally, the software will be multilingual, opening up as yet untapped foreign markets, but the company was keen to talk down its pan-European aspirations as being embryonic at present. More immediate is next month’s plan to launch what Pegasus thinks is the world’s first fully interactive electronic cash book. The technology has been developed with Barclays Bank, and it links the Pegasus Opera cash book module directly to Barclays, cutting out the need for tiresome manual cash book reconciliation using paper-based bank statements. Pegasus is hoping for a covert marketing boost from Barclays’ massive business customer base, and Barclays, in turn, hopes to use the feature to lock in its corporate customers with an irreplaceable new service.
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