Below are UNIT4’s UK press coverage highlights from August

Shaping the agenda for growth 
AccountingWEB

The roles of finance, IT and HR are often considered to be ‘back office’ departments, but also carry major responsibility, explains Rod Newing.

Anwen Robinson, UK Managing Director for UNIT4, is seeing a movement away from the more rigid and traditional business systems towards being easily re-configurable and adaptable without the involvement of time consuming and costly consultancy services. “Such agility and flexibility enables an organisation to change how it collects, processes, reports and presents its financial and operational data after implementation,” she says.

Eversholt Rail Group owns one third of the UK’s passenger rolling stock, as well as freight locomotives and wagons. Starting out as part of British Rail, the company has changed hands several times, resulting in a legacy of different disconnected IT systems. They did not provide the financial and management information needed to enhance and grow the business. The company replaced them withAgresso Business World from UNIT4. It now has a single, integrated financial management system and no longer needs to extract and import information. This saves time and money, improves analysis and reporting and reduces the risk of error with manual data entry.

“We can capture, monitor and manipulate vast amounts of critical financial data,” says Paul Spencer, the company’s Financial Controller. “We can make changes and adapt the system as we need to and we now have a solution that helps us to understand our financial performance to aid our decision making. As our business grows, the system will keep pace with the changes that follow.”

Read full article here

The Practical Cloud: University of York 
BusinessCLOUD09

The University of York has signed up for a Cloud-based e-recruitment service from supplier UNIT4 to streamline the admin involved in hiring new staff.

The University plans to expand with more buildings and staff and will use the software to manage its recruitment of world-class academic, research and support staff. The Agresso e-Recruiter from the supplier will handle York University's job applications via a web interface for applicants integrated with its existing corporate website.

The service will also streamline internal recruiting operations, saving York University time and money through integration, automation and collaboration. It will be delivered in partnership with Hireserve, a HR and recruitment solutions provider. York will also be able to track applications, conduct online tests, search for CVs and manage workflows associated with recruiting its extra staff.

As vacancies may be spread across the University's departments, academic and management recruiters may be infrequent users of the system, so the solution chosen had to be easy to understand and use.

The University is the current Times Higher Education 'University of the Year' and is consistently judged to be one of the top ten universities in the UK for teaching and research.

UNIT4 to implement its Agresso ERP for Manchester City club
ComputerBusiness

Review UNIT4 Business Software, the UK division of UNIT4, has signed a contract with Premier League football club Manchester City to deploy its Agresso Business World ERP suite for sound financial and business management of the club.

The new deployment will help the 2011 FA Cup winner to focus on bringing its business management systems up to the same Premier League standard as its players, who will be accounted for as assets in the system. The system will be accessed by over 300 finance and non-finance users within the club for core accounting/financials, budgeting and forecasting, procurement and reporting and analytics.

Manchester City Head of Finance Andrew Widdowson said the Club is going through a lot of change and like any commercial enterprise is always looking for ways to drive greater efficiency and boost financial performance and profitability..."It is a flexible, functionally rich and highly configurable system that will generate the accurate and comprehensive financial and wider management information we need to help improve our understanding of the Club's performance and help us to achieve our long term objective of being one of the world's leading football clubs, both on and off the field."

Read full article here

Government IT is 'appalling' and wastes 'an obscene amount of public money', say MPs 
Computer Weekly

The UK government sometimes pays 10 times as much as the standard commercial rate for IT projects, is overly reliant on an oligopoly of major suppliers, and "urgently" needs to rebuild its in-house IT skills to reduce the dependence on outsourcing, according to a scathingly critical report by MPs.

Adoption of shared services in central government has to be faster and build on examples of success in local government and the private sector. Organisations are sharing some processes or people, but rarely sharing ICT infrastructure effectively, often as a result of poorly researched buying decisions made last decade. In looking again at these decisions, Central Government departments, agencies and non-departmental public bodies can escape the small number of expensive suppliers in areas like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to make a huge cost saving and find a solution more fitting to today's needs and economic pressures.

There are new innovations that can ensure the success of shared services which central government may not yet have made the most of. These include the easy deployment and use of the technology, the ability of systems to facilitate further change in the organisation post-implementation, without incurring significant cost, independent governance models and benchmarking best practice, electronic process automation, and the way ICT software is hosted - all of which lead to increased efficiency.

With the Cabinet Office's Shared Services Strategic Vision, now is the right time for Finance and Information Officers to consider alternatives to traditional Big ERP systems and look elsewhere for examples of experience and success. By looking at new ways of getting the right ICT in place to support shared service centres, public sector innovators can deliver real cost effective transformational change and find the path to more collaborative ICT choices for back-office ICT infrastructure. (comment from Darren Hunt – UNIT4)

Project control – UNIT4 targets market with BC Assure 
Extranet Evolution

As SaaS construction collaboration technology vendors have sought to differentiate themselves from document management providers, we have seen how some have focused on various areas of workflow (e.g. contract administration, project costs, health & safety) in recent years. In the process, one or two vendors have dropped, or reduced, their use of the term ‘collaboration’, preferring compliance-related phrases such as “project control” (e.g. US-based Meridian’s Prolog; UK-based BIW Technologies began to use this term a couple of years ago as it entered the US market; and I notice ePin is now using the term in a Google Ads campaign).

The latest example of the term’s use that I have seen comes from UNIT4 Collaboration, which is using LinkedIn (“Are you interested in Project Controls?“) to invite people to a seminar next month in Reading, UK. The half-day event is being held at the town-centre Forbury Hotel on 28 September, and is focused on new functionality in UNIT4 Collaboration’s Business Collaborator application: BC Assure. Working with utility client Thames Water, UNIT4 Collaboration says it has developed a quality assurance module that: “makes it easy for project and programme managers, clients and suppliers to manage the quality and compliance of projects at every stage via a secure and fully-auditable platform in The Cloud.”

UNIT4 claims running rival ERP costs 248% more 
PublicTechnology.net

Supplier UNIT4 claims the UK councils running its software are spending up to 3.5 times less in annual running costs, with almost half the number of Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff supporting the software, than those running SAP or Oracle. It bases this claim on two pieces of research; a poll of 20 UK councils that found they spend, on average, £1.2m per year maintaining other ‘big ERP’ systems, and another study it conducted from April to June this year that compared the annual ERP running costs reported by 54 UK councils and the number of full time IT support staff needed for its package, Agresso Business World, versus the two ‘big ERP’ brands. By the lights of the second survey, you need just 0.62 staff to run Agresso versus 1.1 FTEs and 0.72 FTEs respectively to support competitor products.

Meanwhile, the average cost to maintain ERP systems for every 1,000 residents was reported to be between £1,680 and £3,024 per year for the same products, versus a claimed £870 using the same measurements for its product.

“This proves that not all technology can adapt to more austere times and clearly highlights the need to consider the total cost of owning ERP as the ongoing financial burden of maintaining systems can be very high," claimed Anwen Robinson, Managing Director of UNIT4 Business Software Ltd.

UNIT4 bagging bigger contracts 
TechMarketView

It was a pretty good first half for UNIT4 overall but performance was patchy at the country level with the UK one of the areas where there was no revenue growth. It sounds like the mid market vendor (best known for its Agresso ERP and Coda Financial products) surprised itself with its SaaS and subscription revenues, which it described as being stronger than expected, and grew 53% (but from a low base we assume). This is quite something as UNIT4 does not have a well-formed cloud strategy as yet but is a sign that the market is hungry for alternative ways of buying software.

Total revenue was up 13% to Eur 225.9m and within this license revenue grew 22% to Eur 36.3m. At 12% growth, services revenue lagged however, no doubt impacted by the increase in subscription sales. Much of the increase in SaaS revenue will have come from FinancialForce.com, which is built on the Saleforce.com Force platform. The monthly revenue run rate in June 2011 grew almost 300% year on year.

Although known as a mid-market company UNIT4 wants to loosen this attachment and capture larger deals with larger customers (see UNIT4 chipping away at SAP) and had some positive news to announce in the form of a batch of large contracts in Norway (Oslo Commune at Eur 2.5m and a major construction company at Eur 1.5m), the UK (Magnox at Eur 2.5m), the Netherlands (financial services contract worth over Eur 1m) and Poland.

While several markets exceeded expectations in terms of revenue growth the UK was flat which the company said was due to the securing of a number of large contracts in the first half of 2010 that resulted in “a challenging comparison base”. Flat UK performance for the first half of 2011 echoes many other vendors’ experience.

It still struggles with limited recognition in the market, but UNIT4 is on its way up, and its lower cost proposition (in terms of license costs and post implementation cost of change, compared to tier one vendors) is certainly helping it win contracts in the current economic climate.

UNIT4 NV to acquire Professional Software Systems Pte Ltd-DJ 
Reuters

Dow Jones reported that UNIT4 NV is to acquire the Singapore-based Professional Software Systems Pte Ltd (Prosoft). Prosoft is a supplier of software solutions aimed at human resources. The Company finances the acquisition from its cash reserves. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.