According to IT and financial experts, a concerted and detailed approach to the spending of buyers, and indeed the return on that spend, will see vendors needing to increase ‘client intimacy’ to stay ahead of the game. Meanwhile the concept of software as a service (SaaS) is becoming more relevant to customers when it comes to their financial systems, and shared services will enjoy a boost from the Government of all places in the next year to 18 months.
These are just some of the predictions from those busying themselves at keeping abreast of what types of enterprise financial systems will survive the constantly fluctuating constraints of today’s market.
Access Accounting Ireland director, Alex Reeves said that looking towards the remainder of 2009, businesses will be looking for solutions which include cash flow forecasting and credit control with project-based businesses looking towards continued development in real-time access to data as well as ensuring costs are controlled on a project-by-project basis. “Clients are also looking to CRM to really deliver, to make sure the rare new business opportunities are not missed, and more importantly to secure ongoing revenues from their existing customer base,” he added.
Mark McCrory, dynamics business group lead with Microsoft’s Irish offices meanwhile believes that over the next 18 months the demands of the market will continue to be centred on “driving business in a rapidly changing market and using the financial systems as a strategic asset whilst driving down costs”.
Intimacy
Keeping closer to your customers in the future is the recommendation of Sage Ireland’s corporate sales manager, Frank Kelly. “We have to adapt when it comes to developing software, we have to look towards customer intimacy to understand more what they want. I think in the good times going back, people in this space would put out a fact-sheet with ten new features and people would look over it and happily get on board. Now we’re looking more towards industry sectors, looking at the functionality that we have, speaking to customers within those sectors who have used our software for a number of years and seeing what would help them. We design a sales strategy around those findings.” A modular approach may be the most prudent it seems.
Lower spend
Demonstrating just how rapidly the market is changing, Kelly rolled out some figures to chew over. “In the corporate side of things, a lot of the companies who bought larger packages for say EUR*70,000, that budget is often cut down now more towards EUR*40,000. They’re reducing their number of users for one.”
He continued, “For a builder for instance, now that the bottom has dropped out it’s important for them to have their whole job costing process on a computerised system to make sure all the time they’ve spent and materials they’ve sourced are at the right price, that they’re not losing out at all, knowing figures to the penny on how much a job is costing them. We chose that as a sector to go after and we’re internally training our staff to understand what those industries would be feeling at present and adapting our sales strategy to understand it and what our software could do for them.”
Expanding offerings
Peter Simons, a part of the innovation and development team of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), said that business intelligence (BI) vendors have responded to changes in the market by expanding their offerings to include financial tools; “BI could provide the better information management required”, he added. “It’s like this, if you’ll indulge me, back in 1450 a guy called William Caxton went to Antwerp and he came back with a printing press.
“Then he set up a printers in Westminster and started printing books in English and people started buying and reading them in English, including the Bible and getting notions of their own. Meanwhile, there are scribes producing manuscripts in Latin in monasteries who had done since the days of the Book of Kells and they were still doing that.
“The danger that accountants have in producing financial information on a stand-alone basis is that they will find themselves wrong-footed by developments in BI as they will be producing something that will be considered arcane. The old world is gone and software vendors have recognised where financial software is headed and they’re trying to get their systems integrated. I think CIMA are the first financial body to say hang on, it’s not just about financial information, management accountants should be covered in terms of business intelligence because it will allow them to provide better manager information and also free up some of the capacity to give the support the businesses want.”
SaaS
Simons warned though that company-wide BI projects could stall without the “necessary buy-in” from senior management. Both he and Orson Herbst of the Herbst Group also looked towards increasing interest of software as a service (SaaS) with regard to enterprise financial systems over the next year. Herbst noted, “SaaS is gaining huge popularity at present, traceability is becoming huge as well.”
Paul McSweeney, sales manager for Agresso, a fully-integrated suite of ERP applications for services-centric organisations which is part of the Calyx Group, added to the argument for the rise of SaaS, and revealed how it is becoming “more asked for and more relevant”. He also added that the notion of shared service will find its stature within enterprise financial systems, with the lead coming from the Government’s famed ‘An Bord Snip’.
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