Two years of research and development, and seven million dollars worth of investment have gone into the latest version of local software developer Technology One's flagship product, Finance One.
A financial management information system (FMIS) targeted at the mid-range market, Finance One Release 9 (R9) was released last month and is being touted by company officials as a leader in its field.
"With R9, we are out in front because we have spent a lot of time finding out what people want from their financial management systems," Adrian Di Marco, Technology One's managing director, said.
"Other financials have focused on processing data, pioneering features such as EDI and workflow. Finance One R9 delivers these features but where we've put the real emphasis is on the end result which is getting the information out."
According to Di Marco, R9 has been rearchitectured from the ground up to offer new com-ponents designed to deliver the concept of "infor-mation at your fingertips" to end users, including:a fully integrated graphical report writing capability which enables end users to create financial and management reports quickly and easily using a simple point- and-click mechanism; R9 supports a range of publishing formats including spreadsheets, Word documents, e-mail and HTML, again produced via a point-and-click interface;Internet enablement allows users to access information remotely using a Web browser, without any loss of functionality or user interface;enhancements to Finance One's "Dynamism" feature which enables business processes to be changed or data entry screens added or modified to collect additional data. For example, if an organisation chooses to start tracking the travel expenses of their staff by each trip, R9 is able to take one existing account and explode it into tens of thousands of accounts.
Di Marco said he expects the major release to underpin Technology One's projected growth of 40 per cent over the next two years.
As part of the company's planned expansion internationally, Technology One will also be launching R9 into selected overseas markets within the next 12 months, he said.
