ERP firm promises not to kill products

Enterprise ressource planning (ERP) vendor SSA Global has promised customers that although its prices may rise, its product development will not be bogged down by maintaining support for its variety of software brands.

SSA's extended ERP offering supports IBM iSeries, Unix and NT platforms across its products. But even so, the company maintained that there is enough common code between platforms to enable it to effectively bring new products to market.

"We design once and programme multiple times, but programming is the lowest cost element," said Mike Greenough, the company's president, chairman and chief executive.

The company has built its integration around IBM's WebSphere middleware, claiming that it provides 80 per cent of the integration work.

SSA also maintains that its new products will be incremental to existing offerings focusing on the key extended ERP areas of customer relationship management, supply chain management and e-commerce.

The company released version 8.2 of its core BPCS ERP offering last March and maintains that Version 9 is already planned, although no release date has been set.

By contrast, the next version of its PRMS ERP product line - version 10 - is slated for early next year, as is Version 8.5 of its MK Unix ERP offering.

"The key theme going forward is modernisation," said Cory Eaves, vice president of solutions management & research at SSA Global.

SSA Global will detail its product road map for the recently acquired Baan products at BaanWorld, in North Carolina, in two weeks time.

In the longer term the company said it wants to consolidate its products into three main product lines that can share development code and reduce costs. "Migration tools need to be a big investment for us," said Eaves.

Despite plans to consolidate product and code, SSA Global is adamant that it will not stop supporting any of its existing products.

But Greenough acknowledged that when ageing products are kept running by fewer and fewer customers those companies will have to face higher pricing to stay on that software.

That policy may not be extended for products in development. Baan had spent over $100m developing its Gemini software but it is hard pressed to find a reason to persevere with the offering.

"Gemini is a conundrum. Even Baan hadn't forecast a single dollar of revenue to come from Gemini next year. We will have to re-evaluate what we will do," said Greenough.