DEALER PROFILE - City's Linkhand goes with the workflow

Company founded 1992

Location London Bridge, London

Company headcount 25 permanent staff, plus a number of contractors depending on the size and nature of the project

International presence We service clients in Europe and the US.

Board members Tony Gale, chairman; Kevin Osborn, managing director; Ian Soden, operations director; Geoff Goulson, consultant director; John Pile, technical director; Mo Braga, development director.

Year end 21 March

Turnover #2.9 million

Profit #200,000

Main product lines Livelink intranet and internet-based knowledge management software; Staffware workflow software; Life Odin document management software.

Core markets In the workflow area we specialise in insurance and banking.

We have developed specialist processing skills in this sector which gives us an advantage over our rivals when approaching new customers. More than 50 per cent of our business is in this vertical market. We also service large and small clients in the manufacturing, aerospace and media industries.

Key accounts Barclays, Benfield Greg, Sedgewick, (banking and insurance), GKN Westland (aerospace), BSkyB (media).

Accreditation We hold no formal accreditation, but as an ISV we work alongside vendors to develop products all the time. We are currently working with Microsoft to develop a back-office document management system for NT and SQL Server. If we thought there was any value in accreditation, or a vendor insisted, we would get it.

Distributors We deal directly with the vendors. Generally speaking, these products are too specialised to be sold through distribution.

Main competitors Documentum, FileNet and August (formally RDL) are our main rivals in the insurance sector. Lotus Notes resellers are always going to be big competitors for us.

What could vendors do to make your life easier? For businesses of all sizes, knowledge is by far the most valuable asset. But for most companies it is also the least utilised. To close deals successfully, we need to get this message across to customers. To do that we need vendors to supply more technical resources and up-to-date information about trends in the market. That means a better line of communication with the people in the US. This is especially the case when dealing with international clients.

To be able to compete effectively we have to know the very latest position on the products we supply, our competitors and general market trends.

Implementing the systems is our bread and butter - we probably know more about the integration process than the vendors do - but we are lacking in basic resources and support.

What do you think of the claim made this week by Prove It 2000 that 300,000 jobs in the UK will be lost due to businesses underestimating the year 2000 problem? Our business has not been hugely affected by the millennium compliance issue. We have customised one of our systems for a client which is using it as an auditing tool to check the progress of its millennium activities in its various subsidiaries. Also, a very fast-growing trend in the banking and insurance sector is to automate processes as much as possible. We have been asked to do this in anticipation of large-scale redundancies so systems can continue to run smoothly even if key staff have to be laid off. But this is in anticipation of a recession rather than due to year 2000.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, says client/server computing is dead. Do you think the internet will revolutionise the IT industry, or is its significance being overstated? It's already doing so but I don't think it will be all-consuming. The great advantage of the internet is the virtual office capability that it provides. For example, when we are implementing a project for an international client over a widespread area, product launch and maintenance can be managed centrally simply by accessing the relevant URLs. In that respect, the internet is facilitating the growth of our potential market. But technically the internet model, particularly with reference to software development, is limited by bandwidth. It remains to be seen if there's still a place for the client/server model.