Peregrine Systems Inc has signed up ICL Plc, the UK services arm of Fujitsu, in a partnership that will allow it to distribute its infrastructure resource planning (IRP) products to new markets in Scandinavia and Western Europe. Chief executive Steve Gardner told ComputerWire last November that IRP provides automatic tracking of what we own, how well it’s working and how much it’s costing us. This might include buildings, PCs, people, automobiles or intellectual property.
The San Diego, California infrastructure management software house, is trying to team with multinational services and consulting firms to extend its market reach. It has forged agreements with IBM Global Services and Electronic Data Systems Corp to provide its software for their outsourcing contracts, and a similar contract with KPMG for its consultancy contracts. Peregrine is also talking to Ernst & Young, Deloitte Consulting and Andersen Consulting.
The ICL deal is critical to Peregrine, says EMEA vice president Jeremy Crook, because ICL will be using everything that we do. Peregrine develops systems for asset management, facilities management, fleet management and IT management, tracking a company’s buildings, equipment, vehicles and PCs and networks.
Peregrine is gaining some software through the ICL deal as well as a lucrative channel. Its products will now contain embedded ICL open technology interface (OTI) integration software, which enables contractors’ systems to read information extracted from legacy systems. Peregrine won the deal after being short-listed along with Remedy, Scopus and Clarify.
The contract enables Peregrine to increase visibility in key markets. UK general manager Derek Watkins picked out the mature ERP markets in Scandinavia and Finland in particular as a strength of ICL. The partnership with IBM Global Services is strong in Germany, another crucial market. Europe currently provides 40% of the company’s total revenue, with the US making up 50% and the rest coming from the Asia-Pacific region.
To balance the geographical expansion, Peregrine plans to strengthen its product line. It says it is on the verge of an imminent announcement to form a partnership with a Canadian company. We have found what we believe is the world’s best product, says Crook. The network discovery tool draws a complete map of a company network, allowing managers to see what is on the network, the license status of different software products, and likely problem areas.
In the longer term, Peregrine is looking at management of intellectual property and personnel. Intellectual property is on the radar, but in personnel, although the company currently integrates its products with PeopleSoft human resources applications, Watkins says we could do more. He suggests that future products will integrate personnel management with the management of the rest of the organization, so that an employee joining a company will automatically receive all the equipment needed to operate, rather than having a series of memos and belated requests.
