Unisys makes a splash in uncharted waters

By ADAM GIFFORD

Unisys ASP Services has taken over hosting and managing the Southfresh online fish market from Greenwood Technology.

Southfresh director Toby Warren said his company had a unique solution for creating online marketplaces for perishable goods, and it wanted a partner who could take it worldwide.

"You're known by the company you keep. Unisys gives us not only security of hosting but together we will seek to take this application to other territories Unisys is operating in," Mr Warren said.

"Unisys is working with us to go worldwide and that is exciting."

It is one of a series of wins for the new Unisys division which will allow it to break even by June, nine months ahead of schedule, while many other application service providers around the world are finding the going tough.

Others recent wins for Unisys ASP include:

* Fisher & Paykel's use of the Orderware electronic commerce package from Genie Systems to connect up its United States dealers.

* A deal to offer Relay cashbook software from Christchurch firm Genztech to farmers registered with Kiwi Dairy's Fencepost site.

* The successful introduction of a large Great Plains accounting system run on ASP for bathroom supplier Athena.

* Adoption of Stayinfront's Splashnet online customer and staff management system by companies such as investment advisers New Zealand Funds Management and electronic marketplace creator SupplyNet.

Unisys ASP Services manager Sean McDonald said Splashnet and its bigger version, Webworks, have been the most successful applications so far. The disappointment had been high end accounting package QSP Financials, for which there had been no takers.

Mr McDonald said that when Unisys ASP Services launched last July, it expected a sizeable chunk of customers to be small and medium businesses (SMBs) looking to rent enterprise-level applications they could not afford under older licensing and technology models.

"In fact, we've found the market is not there for SMBs. It's the large companies like Fisher & Paykel and the New Zealand Fund who want a low-risk entry into electronic commerce."

Unisys offers a range of services. At a basic level there is ASP Direct, where user data sits on a partitioned database and there is only limited customisation allowed. Users can go on to the system very quickly, allowing them to make quick decisions about whether they want to proceed. They can choose greater customisation and security.

In the case of NZ Funds Management, after a five-user Splashnet pilot on ASP Direct at $95 per user per month, the company put all its 160 agents on Splashnet at $195 per user per month.

Genie Systems' Australasian general manager Nigel Varcoe said that a Fisher & Paykel engineer summed up what Orderware on ASP offered. "He said they wanted to use a dial, so they could turn it up as volumes through the system increased."

Now Fisher & Paykel have finished the pilot stage, Genie Systems is working to integrate Orderware into its back end JD Edwards' ERP system using Genie's DTM (Data Transformation Module) tool.

Mr Varcoe said the association with Unisys was helping Genie fine tune the ASP elements of its software to make it work effectively in a web browser.

It has also forced Genie to look closely at its marketing, and to develop strategies for the provision of integrated services.

Mr McDonald said Unisys had evolved its charging and licensing models as it came to understand the markets for the software packages it offered.

"We thought we would be going for a pure revenue share model, but we found that wasn't attractive to ISVs [independent software vendors], and clients wanted more choice. So we offer revenue sharing, but there is also the option of customers buying the licenses up front."

One criticism of ASP was that customers would be locked into continual rental payments. Under the Unisys model, customers can pay off the software after 36 months, and just pay maintenance and hosting fees from then.

Mr McDonald said that so far Unisys had spent $6 million in New Zealand on its ASP project, and considered it was getting an excellent return for its money.

It has put 13 applications through its e-validates process, of which only three have passed, an indication of how hard it is to write applications thin enough, or which can quickly scale up if there is a sudden rush of users onto the system.

Links:

www.southfresh.co.nz

www.asp.unisys.co.nz