Coda pumps £4m into ASP business model
Financial software vendor Coda has announced it will pour money into the application service provider arena as it seeks to expand the company's routes to market.
Financial software vendor Coda has announced it will pour money into the application service provider (ASP) arena as it seeks to expand the company's routes to market.
David Turner, international marketing manger at Coda, said the vendor was in talks with UK-based ASPs. "We aim to increase turnover aggressively from ASPs over the next two years," he said.
As part of the scheme, Coda claimed it will also invest £4m over three years into ASP and business-to-business initiatives. Jeremy Roach, president of product strategy, research and development at Coda, said: "We will use the money to match the rental streams of our ASP customers.
"We want to share the risk with our partners to help them get off the ground, but we have no desire to become an ASP ourselves."
The move means that Coda now puts only one-third of its business through the channel, compared with 70 per cent when the company was owned by Dutch software vendor, Baan.
As reported earlier this month, Coda has been planning to move away from relying solely on channel sales, and the company has already appointed ASP partners in Italy, Holland and the US.
Since Science Systems acquired Coda, the company has had more business in its first two months that it did in its last year of ownership under Baan.
Turner said Coda had not cut any of its existing partners, but had instead appointed three new resellers.
However, rival Systems Union disagreed with Coda's courting of ASPs. Kate Beard, EMEA marketing manager at System Union, said: "Michael Williams [ex-chairman of Systems Union] wanted to go down the ASP route when he first started, but that has changed.
"There is a huge fear and risk for customers to outsource when they have already spent heavily on integrating software into their systems. ASP has potential but we are not ready to jump in with both feet."