In a modest start, President Paul Dorius said his company’s work to create the eXegetic Resource Planning suite (eRP) had resulted in several sales of HP 3000s at sites where the system hadn’t served before. The company was named as the lead supplier of manufacturing solutions in HP’s IA-64 announcement for HP 3000s during July, making eXegeSys products a focal point for winning new HP 3000 business.

“That is happening,” Dorius said of the company’s ability to sell new systems. “We do have a couple of new users who have signed on with us. They’ve seen what we’re doing — a very competitive product — and they like what they see. But it would be premature to start using their names publicly,” Dorius said. These discrete manufacturing companies have less than six months’ experience with eRP, he explained. The migrations to the 3000s came from PC-based solutions.

The work the company has done to overhaul the old MM II and HP FM applications has had even more impact retaining 3000 customers, Dorius said. It’s a portion of the 3000 customer base where attrition has been heaviest.

“We’ve been involved with a variety of organizations that have said their plan was to leave the HP 3000 completely,” Dorius said. “It was only because of our involvement with and commitment to the future of the [manufacturing suite] product that they’ve stayed with the products, and in fact reinvested.
“There are others, however that have continued to invest in the HP 3000 world, because of their existing use of the legacy MM II applications — and their renewed confidence in those packages because we’re doing something with them.”

Some customers who call themselves MM users work with the financial modules of the system, a suite called MM II which includes the HP Financial Management (FM) software. Others use HP Materials Management, the original core of the product line including inventory control and MRP. eXegeSys works with the suite called MM II.

Year 2000 work on the applications was completed by HP prior to transferring the products to eXegeSys, Dorius said. HP modified applications to handle Year 2000 with versions. Financial and inventory modules have already had revisions, to “fix some longstanding issues as well as future issues with the Euro,” Dorius said. “We’re also been working with the presentation layers, so we can accommodate reporting and client-server structures.”

The Euro work, which lets the applications work with the new European currency to be first introduced next year, isn’t complete yet. “We’ve done a lot of design analysis and specification writing. We’ve got a team of people looking at the best methods for implementing that now. We plan on having it in time to address the issues that existing and future users of the applications will have.

“There could be superficial responses that technically meet the [Euro] spec,” Dorius said. “How realistic they are is a matter of discussion. Euro is not an amazingly clear-cut issue, because not even to date are all the rules written. Along with our European affiliate VDS Computing, we have been working to set a statement of direction about where we want to go with [the Euro], specifically in all of the elements, especially in transactional elements of FM and also in FA.”

Euro solutions for MM II could range from a complete rewrite, to archival implementation with keyword searches, to a large batch job that forces every user through the transition. VDS, an HP channel partner based in Belgium, sold its own manufacturing application as well as selling and supporting MM II.

The company has taken on “tens of millions of lines of code” from HP. “We have the components we want to work on so far,” Dorius said. “HP is kind of rolling [the code] to us as we can assume it. We’re responsible for it and teaming with them through this 18-month transition period.” HP turns over support of MM II to eXegeSys completely in February 1999.

eXegeSys has built a response center to handle its support of current MM II customers, an installed base that’s estimated at about 1,000 systems worldwide. Under the terms of the agreement signed last year, eXegeSys will handle all MM II support.

“Our emphasis has been to try and consolidate and revitalize not only the existing products but to try and respond to the existing users,” Dorius said. “Our building of our response center and many of those activities are really targeted at existing users than at new users.”

Kriss Rant, the new Alliance Development Manager for the HP 3000 division, noted the eXegeSys efforts in the future should include a broader push outside the installed HP 3000 base.

“They are advertising in some of the installed base publications, but they need to be more focused in the verticals they’re going after,” he said.

The company has announced promotions for its products that run through the end of 1998, including a bundle of the complete eRP offering at 60 percent off list price when purchased with an HP 3000 system. The bundle comes in at $2,500 per user with a 20-seat minimum. Another package sells as a software bundle at the 60 percent discount for “organizations dominated by capital assent maintenance activity.” Other second-half sale items are upgrades from HP FM and MM process and repetitive manufacturing, as well as new client capability to employ Windows and Windows NT.

The main server application for eXegeSys products is only hosted on HP 3000s, however. “I’ve loved the 3000 since I first came in contact with it almost two decades ago,” Dorius said. “I think it’s a great platform.”