Cedardata Plc is spending a great deal of money to turn itself into a totally different company. It is best known as the developer of cfacs, a longest-established Oracle-based financial system, which had many admirers in the public sector. And despite poor financial results in the last financial year, the company has made a good recovery in the current twelve months with revenues up 20% to 12.5m pounds and a big improvement in margins leading to net income showing a 50.9% rise to 1.6m pounds. Cedardata is nothing but ambitious. It believes that, in the words of the directors’ statement, many large enterprises find themselves with a patchwork of unintegrated legacy systems which have yet to be harnessed effectively in the delivery of high standards of customer care and management. Where Cedardata sees its role is to provide software capable of such integration. Now this is proving an expensive process for a company of its modest size. It is in the process of acquiring up to 18m pounds worth of intellectual property in deals stretching to 2001. Qualtech, to be acquired in a deal worth up to 7m pounds, provides software to measure call center effectiveness. Pmpl, which provides data warehousing products, has already sold two software packages to Cedardata for 2m pounds and now the whole company is to be swallowed up in a deal worth up to 6m pounds. The whole organization is to be beefed up to support the new products and it is moving to larger premises. The first half of the current year is likely to see the costs, rather than the benefits, of the acquisitions but these are expected to slow through in the second six months. Having seen Cedardata lose its way in 1997, the market still remains skeptical about the company and the shares fell 5 pence to 161.5 pence on the results. I
