Privately owned, business software house Systems Union is looking more and more like an acquisition target for the likes of Dodge or SAP. The UK-based firm is proving very successful at tapping what it calls the medium-scale financial software market, a market which the bigger fish have to date been unable to capture with their high-end offerings. Its SunSystems financial software package is available in 22 languages and claims to have 13,000 customer sites around the world. It runs on PC networks, most Unix boxes, Windows NT, Oracle and SQL Server set-ups. Systems Union reckons that as the likes of SAP AG and PeopleSoft Inc realize that fewer and fewer large corporations are still without financial software, they are sure to look to new markets for revenue: namely the medium and small enterprises. But Systems Union Group Chief Operating Officer John Paterson says that they won’t find it easy: You just can’t sell that level of product to the medium-scale market. It’s very hard to rip functionality out of a product…and you can’t re-engineer R/3. SAP would need a new product. He also argues that the big boys a la PeopleSoft and SAP would need to change their entire sales organizations to attack the new market.

Acquisition target

An easier strategy would of course be to acquire a company with all the necessary knowledge of the medium scale market. That includes JD Edwards & Co, Coda Group Plc, Lawson Software Inc, Financial Objects Ltd, Great Plains Software Inc and others. But all of these earn the majority of their revenue in their domestic markets, with the exception of Systems Union, which earns just 40 per cent of its revenue in the UK. It also sells its SunSystems financial software into 170 countries, and claims that it will be number one in the medium-scale market by the year 2000. The company has just partnered with Florida-based Citrix Systems Inc to enable users to access its software over the Internet, a corporate intranet or a WAN. The company is also re-architecting SunSystems to enable systems administrators to vary how much processing is carried out on the client, and how much on the server. Systems Union calls this granular client/server, and says it will be ready in December 1997.