Paris, France-based Information systems management company, Wincap Software SA has opened a new UK office and says it’s looking to aggressively expand its fledgling international operations ahead of an initial public offering penciled in for June 1998. Wincap has built its business on the back of its eponymous suite client/server software, designed to enable users to access, maintain and update information systems comprising programs, databases and scheduling information. It works by transferring the various components and the relationships into objects and links, and reconstructing them in a repository, which can then be put on the server and accessed by users. Originally designed for systems migration projects or for reconstructing documents to comply with new corporate and legal requirements, WinCap has instead found that its business has largely been driven by firms looking to solve Year 2000 and EMU compliance problems. Year 2000 compliance currently accounts for around 60% of revenues. Wincap has added a number of query and analysis functions to cater for this market, enabling it to scan the application code and find the relevant date or currency fields which need to be changed. The new office is the third international unit to open in 1997, a year which has seen the business grow significantly with pushes into Germany and the US and distribution agreements with suppliers in Spain and Italy. Wincap says around 30% of its revenues currently come from its international business, a figure it’s looking to grow to 60% by the end of 1998. It now has around 350 installations worldwide, 90% of which are in France. In 1996 the company had a workforce of 40 with revenues of around $6m, making a small profit. The workforce has expanded to around 150 in 1997 and Wincap now expects to break even on revenues of $16m. Its priority over the next year will be to expand support for other data types and ramp up its worldwide operations ahead of its IPO. It is looking for partnerships with systems integrators and services companies in Singapore and Japan and says it’s currently talking to Fujitsu amongst others.
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