A rising tide raises all ships, and Mapics Inc, the discrete manufacturing software vendor for AS/400s, is being lifted by the swelling enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market, which is still growing at a 40% clip each year. Mapics was created after Marcam and Mapics divorced from each other last August. Marcam, a maker of ERP software for process manufacturers on both AS/400 and Windows NT platforms, originally bought the Mapics application business from IBM in 1993, never could get synergy going with the former IBMers in Atlanta, and both companies are clearly better off without the other. In the quarter just ended, Mapics reported license revenues for its eponymous ERP suite were up 56% to $19m; services revenues grew more modestly – only 32% – to $13m. For the nine months ended, Mapics has sold $54m of software and $36.6m of services and looks to break above $100m for the first time in its long history. While that doesn’t put Mapics in the same weight class as JD Edwards or System Software Associates, which sell AS/400 and open systems implementations of their ERP suites, Mapics remains an all-AS/400 software house. Its undivided dedication to the AS/400 is its hallmark and that strategy is clearly paying off with the latest Mapics implementation, Mapics XA Release 4, which was introduced earlier in the year and which is the driving force behind the 56% increase in license sales. Even though Mapics has spent 1998 building up its marketing staff, and has spent millions on promoting its new company and new product, it still has $25m in the bank with which to enhance its product and expand its marketing efforts against other players in the market. In particular, Mapics plans to broaden its base of 2,100 Mapics XA users by concentrating its sales efforts on large corporations with multiple sites in the US or with data centers peppered around the globe. While it doesn’t say so, Mapics undoubtedly hopes to cash in on the Year 2000 and Euro nightmares of the 4,500 users of prior generations of Mapics code. This is obviously reflected in Wall Street’s assessment of Mapics, which has it earning $0.80 a share in fiscal 1998, $1.00 a share in 1999 and $1.32 a share in 2000.
