In French, the word used for software depends on the type of software under discussion. If it’s a custom-developed, non-commercial program, it is a logiciel. Packaged, commercialised software products are progiciels, a word that is a fusion of the French for produit and logiciel. According to the almost-20-year history of CXP International SA, the company, which was then an association of nine large user companies, coined the word progiciel back in 1978. Alain Pauly, CXP’s European business development manager, says They believed in the importance of packaged software, even if it was just a small market back then.
Truly difficult
No longer. CXP’s business is a mirror image of the size and importance of the packaged software market. In 1991, which Pauly says was a truly difficult year, CXP realised revenues of $7.2m from providing users with information to help them evaluate and select packaged software. CXP’s success has been such that in June it created a joint stock subsidiary, CXP International, out of CXP Association. It’s not too often that you have an association creating a joint stock subsidiary, Pauly says. CXP International has been set up with initial capital assets of $2.2m. Part of those funds, he says, will be used to help the company grow, and for projects, like adding new features to CXP’s electronic database of software products information. The database, which is accessible from any terminal on France’s public viewdata system, Minitel, contains technical and functional descriptions of 12,500 software products, or about 85% of the French progiciels market. Pauly cites data from France Telecom, showing that CXP’s database gets about 165,000 connections per year, each lasting, on average, between five and six minutes. Inclusion in the database is free for the supplier, says Pauly, adding that CXP earns revenue through its proportion of the fees paid to France Telecom for Minitel access and hrough advertisements on the database.
The Japanese are regarded as incredibly backward in computing terms because it has been such an uphill struggle getting packaged software accepted there – and there is still a very long way to go. But even in France, perhaps the most highly developed software and services market in the world, they didn’t even have a word for package until 1978 – and there we were thinking progiciel had been around all our computing life. The term was coined by CXP International SA, which leads the way in waving the tricolore for packages. Marsha Johnston reports from Paris.
The information product for which CXP is best known, however, is its catalogues, of which it produces about 40 annually. They are classified horizontally, by cross-industry applications such as accounting, finance, purchasing; vertically, by industry; and by operating system. Recently, says Pauly, CXP has published five Euro-catalogues: CASE & Development Tools, Manufacturing Management, Project Management, CAD/CAM and EDI. We consider a software product European if it is available in at least two countries and is in at least two languages, he says. All the catalogues include a brief introduction to the market area and an index of all of the products and companies covered. Then, for each product, they list technical characteristics, detailed functional description, commercial information (price, available training, maintenance plans), and the number of user sites worldwide declared by the vendor. Pauly cautions that CXP is not able to verify every single item about every product in the catalogs, particularly the number of user sites. CXP does comparative studies, however, where it verifies everything, Pauly says. For each comparative study, CXP chooses between four and six products and sends a questionnaire of 300-odd items to the vendor of each package. CXP staff then attend demonstrations of the product and sit down with the vendor to go over the questionnaire. It’s up to the supplier to prove to us how the product works, Pauly says. CXP does about 20 comparative studies per year, which are classifi
ed by cross-industry application type. The products to be surveyed are selected by CXP’s board of directors, which comprises 16 user companies. CXP also counts hardware and software vendors among its members, but none of them sit on the board, enabling the company to retain its independence, Pauly says. CXP’s most valuable product, says Pauly, is its dossier prospectif.
Diagrams
In the three or four it does each year, CXP interviews users and suppliers about what they are doing in-house with a particular technology, such as Electronic Data Interchange, computer aided software engineering or client-server architecture. Its software engineering issue, for example, includes details from Borland International Inc about how it develops and tests its software products, complete with diagrams, Pauly says. The company also publishes a monthly magazine and conducts seminars, both on user experiences and market analysis by CXP analysts. Once a year, it organises user presentations at a conference on development tools for Blenheim/Capric in France. The conference this year, on Software Engineering and Open Systems, was held on October 13 to 15 in Paris. With its new capital structure, says CXP’s president-director general Armand Gambert, CXP wants to become the principle focal point in Europe for information on software packages.
