Steve Gardner, CEO and President of Peregrine Systems Inc, wants to be in at the birth of a new market – what he calls infrastructure resource planning (IRP). Great, you may think, just what the IT sector needs, a new acronym, but Gardner claims that a convergence of technologies has led to the emergence of a new sector. He boasts that the San-Diego-based company is the dominant player in an infant market but says that the sector has enormous potential in a infrastructure addicted world. The core of Peregrine’s IRP offerings is its long-standing ServiceCenter helpdesk software, along with the AssetCenter asset management software and the SpanFM technology the firm acquired from its Innovative Tech Systems Inc buy earlier this year (CI No 3,406). The basic concept of IRP is the tracking of the psychical and fiscal life span of a company’s infrastructure. Gardener says that means tracking what we own, how well it’s working and how much its costing us. Gardener sees IRP as a complement to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, changing the internal workings of a company in the same way that ERP has overhauled the business approach to ordering and selling products. The company has released and is releasing products to solidify this concept. These include a new Java client and an OLAP data mining tool, ServiceCenter Insight.
European push
The company is also gearing for a European push of its ServiceCenter 2000 package. This bundles customized versions of its problem management, change management, inventory and configuration management and ServiceCenter Insight tools. Gardner characterizes the package, which was released in late September in the US, as a crisis management and clean-up tool. He says it is aimed at companies that haven’t completely dealt with their Y2K issues, saying that such companies are probably not going to make it. The firm intends to sell the bundle on a rental basis, at $3000 a month, for a 10-user system over 2 years. After which, the customer can either return the software, continue to rent it, or buy it. The company is also readying a new version of AssetCenter, which Gardner says is the world’s first EMU compliant workflow tool. In the longer term, Peregrine is planning customized suites for the healthcare and retail markets. The software is aimed at large companies, Gardner says that the average sale usually costs around $150,000 in software and software service costs and that such a system takes six to eight weeks to implement. He notes that change management systems can take much longer to implement and that it is hard to give an off the rack price for the sort of system Peregrine deals in. He admits that we do not believe we yet have the full IRP structure but claims that Peregrine is the closest to achieving that aim. He says that the holes in Peregrine’s portfolio are the lack of a transportation fleet management tool and weakness in the telephony area, but claims the company is working on filling the gaps. He also says that the ease of implementation of IRP suites will be crucial, that people will want a suite of products on CD ROM which are 80% to 85% of what the customer are going to need, rather than tools that require a lot of integration with current systems. In addition, to further ease the implementation process, the firm is lining up alliances with service and integration firms such as Cap Gemini. The company is also working with Peoplesoft, Oracle and SAP to smooth the interfacing with ERP systems and is planning to onto Baan and J.D Edwards as well. Gardener admits that in common with the major ERP players, there will eventually be a push to sell IRP systems to the mid-range market. In the way that the ERP firms have to shore up license revenues. However, he estimates that IRP is six or seven years behind ERP in market maturity and the firm is currently aiming software at the Fortune 100 bracket. Gardner says that the nascent market is highly fragmented but expects it to consolidate fast and attract others to the feast, so Peregrine is looking to grab as much market share as we can now. The company is pursuing an aggressive acquisition and R&D strategy. The CEO sees the competition in the nascent sector as PSDI, Datastream and Indus, while allowing that Remedy – the firm’s traditional rival in its core helpdesk software market- has good technology but says that the firm missed the transition from tools to bundling and customized suites.
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