Published on the 20/02/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
The re-engineered enterprise software platform developed by Technology One borrows from consumer technology to halt the update treadmill…
Two years ago listed software vendor Technology One promised Ci2 as a replacement for its Ci enterprise platform. Co-founder and executive chairman Adrian Di Marco this week said the company had spent $80 million and a team of 200 who had worked on the new software.
Technology One demonstrated the system – now renamed as Ci Anywhere – at its user conference on the Gold Coast this week, and announced that it would be making apps available from its Enterprise Apps Store starting in March.
Ci Anywhere operates on premise or in the cloud. Cloud users of the system access the platform (which is hosted for the company by Amazon Web Services out of its Sydney data centres) through a browser interface on any device.
At present only about 10 percent of Technology One’s customers are cloud-based, but Di Marco expects this to grow to 20 percent this year and 40 percent in 2015.
More than 60 percent of the company’s user base has already moved across to the consolidation version of Ci which means that they won’t have to go through another software update for at least four, and possibly as long as ten years, according to Di Marco. Instead they can add functions or capability by downloading apps.
Ci Anywhere has a technically light footprint; Di Marco said that in tests it had managed to support up to 200 concurrent users on a single server, compared to the 10 users per server that was possible with the previous generation software.
The look and feel of the new system borrows heavily from consumer technology with active tiles and touch-friendly design.
Unlike many software-as-a-service vendors, Technology One is not planning to encourage a rich ecosystem of plug-ins. Instead Di Marco said that any third party plug-ins would likely be highly specialised as it was Technology One’s intent to be accountable for the total experience it provided to users. “The ecosystem will be small,” he acknowledged.
Asked about the financial pain that transitioning to a cloud-based, subscription model, might impose on Technology One, which has been used to a sales and service model, Di Marco said that although that wasn’t completely clear he believed that the scale Technology One could grow to with the cloud, and the increased margins it promised should smooth the transition.
“We have three people in the operations centre and they can run 1000 users,” he said.
The author attended the evolve conference as a guest of Technology One.
