Changes in the UK Software Market

A Norwegian company, Asolvi AS, is shaking up the market for software that runs sales and servicing companies in the UK with the acquisition of one of the niche providers, Purpose.

Asolvi’s software portfolio already includes Tesseract, Evatic and Winserv and so one wonders how the addition of the CBS and 2Serv products to that portfolio will pan out.

Managing a large and diverse set of software products could prove problematic. For example does one have five different development and support teams to ensure that the software continues to develop as the market requires and that the standards of support are maintained?

Each team would need specialist managers, ten in total, and those managers would need managing, say on a ratio of five to one, so that is a further two senior managers. Sounds expensive doesn’t it not to mention the difficulties in focussing the sales efforts so that in essence the company salespeople are not competing with each other as much as with the competition.

So what would you do if you were faced with these challenges and if the budget did not stack up?

One thing you might do is rationalise the range of offerings so which one(s) would you drop? CBS would be a good contender because it runs on a three dimensional database which has less in common with the other products in the portfolio even though that database performs very well and is very robust.

You would not want to lose the sites that you have acquired via the purchase of Purpose and so you would make strong efforts to switch users to other products in your portfolio.

Another question for you is what would you do if you are a CBS user and you have invested time and effort in learning to use the CBS software and the three dimensional database and making it fit the needs of your business?

Well a sound move would be to talk to VALE Support Services who are specialists in three dimensional databases, have software that is very effective in running the medium and larger sales and servicing businesses and provide a great deal of localisation so that the software fits the company processes.

enquiries@vale.co.uk

01844 267500