Sapiens International Corp is on the verge of announcing a three to five year partnership with a billion dollar US tools vendor that will expand the market reach of its Euro conversion software and services. The partner will add strategic project management capability, to Sapiens more practical expertise in systems migration, which Sapiens believes will bolster its effort to exploit euro conversion business opportunities.
The North Carolina mainframe development tools provider is also talking here in the UK with large hardware vendors about joint marketing deals, says Sapiens UK managing director Yair Spitzer. Spitzer says that he has a team of 20 in the UK working on euro-related business, compared to five each for the next two most profitable revenue streams, enterprise application integration and e-commerce.
Sapiens has published a Euro Compliance Readiness Survey which reports that 88% of UK companies have yet to initiate or complete their plans to cope with the euros. The earliest date for the euro is January 1, 2002, Sapiens argues, which gives little time for migrating data and for planning that migration. You better start your projects this year, warns Amir Barnea, Sapiens product manager who specializes in the euro.
Sapiens euro conversion methodology involves a pilot scheme for prospective clients, an analysis for time and cost in which the company’s IT system is mapped out with all linked applications charted for synchronized migration. The pilot takes between four and eight weeks with the analysis costing between $320m and $1bn.
Spitzer says that the euro is between five and ten times bigger than the Y2K issue, on which firms have been focusing for months. Spitzer gives an example of a large British insurance house which allocated a budget of $130m for Y2K compliance, compared to a budget of $400m for dealing with the euro.
