The word around town is that Gateshead-based financial software house, Quality Software Products Ltd plans to go public. Chairman Alan Mordain acknowledged ‘flotation is an option that we are seriously considering’. If the company does decide to take this route, marketing manager, Richard Hannam said that international expansion may well follow – Quality Software has been examining the US market for some time, he added. According to The Independent, Hoare Govett will undertake the share plac-ing, which could coincide with the launch of the group’s new product. Universal OLAS is a portable version of Quality’s well-established OLAS financial software – this traditionally runs on IBM Corp mainframes and is targeted at large public and private concerns. Customers include W H Smith and the Bank of England. Hannam claims that Universal OLAS will broaden the product’s appeal to encompass ‘smaller large organisations’. Suitable environments include Unix, IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, and Hewlett-Packard Co boxes. The new offering also runs native on DB2, he said, supports all graphical user interfaces and all major relational databases, such as Sybase, Oracle and Ingres. Universal OLAS will be available from February 18, with pricing dependent on both the environment and the number of users. Quality Software is currently 70%-owned by its staff and management, 16%-owned by venture capitalists 3i, and 14%-owned by IBM UK. In 1992, it made net profits of about UKP1m, on turnover of UKP13m, and the Independent estimates it could be valued at UKP18m.
