SOTA A Leader in NT Financial Applications Software Message Board

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Technology Stocks : SOTA A Leader in NT Financial Applications Software

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To: Jalali who wrote (11)	8/17/1997 9:35:00 PM
From: Alan A. Hicks	of 21

SOTA announced independent benchmarks Thursday showing SOTA's new MAS 90cs for NT performs 25 times faster than Great Plains Dynamics C/S+ in a NT Server network environment. SOTA plans to launch an aggressive advertising campaign in all the major accounting journals and popular PC magazines as an open challenge to Great Plains (GPSI) and Solomon (28 times faster than Solomon IV) to participate in a product shootout between the leading Windows accounting vendors in the mid-range market. These benchmarks were observed and audited by well known independent industry analyst Stewart McKie. His reviews of financial applications using Microsoft technology often appear on the Microsoft WEB site. He has also written several books on financial applications. MAS 90cs for NT not only increases performance but also increases network capacity to 100 users from a current limit of 20 on MAS 90 running on a Novell LAN Network. MAS 90cs is also optimized for WAN and dial-up remote access. Any customer with remote sites will also benefit from MAS 90cs. Competing products must use additional software such as Citrix Winframe to achieve remote access. Besides costing as much as $5000 extra, competing products run considerably slower than MAS 90cs with built-in remote access using standard Microsoft technology. Over a 28.8 modem, the time to update an order-entry screen took 10.8 seconds using Citrix Winframe versus 2.4 seconds running MAS 90cs. The average selling price (ASP) for MAS 90cs on a 20 user system is $20,000 vs $10,000 for MAS 90W. MAS 90cs could quickly become 20 to 25% of MAS 90 revenues and represent a major component in a 40%+ revenue gain in the current quarter. An equivalent 20 user system from GPSI and Solomon are each about $34,000. MAS 90 is for the typical mid-range customer that does not need the more sophisticated capabilities provided by SOTA's Acuity using a Microsoft SQL Server relational database. MAS 90cs began shipping at the end of June. VARs are reporting significant pent up demand from existing MAS 90 customers with more than 10 users on a network as well as those with remote sites. MAS 90cs is also a significant new customer opportunity that will increase SOTA's lead in the mid-range market and continue to take market share. MAS 90W has been outselling Great Plains and all other Windows products since its last June release. IDC market share figures for 1995 were 24% SOTA to 20% for GPSI. SOTA's feels they were in the high 20's in 1996 and will continue to take market share this year. A number of vendors with obsolete technology are falling by the way side. MAS 90cs extends the capabilities of MAS 90 with a true high performance client/server (thin client, server centric) architecture that is not available from other vendors in mid-range LAN market. The technology in both MAS 90W and MAS 90cs comes from the recent acquisition of Sybex by SOTA. Sybex makes the tools that provide a bridge between legacy business basic applications to standard Microsoft technology. Upgrades based on this technology over the next 12 months will be full internet support including a Java based version of MAS 90. The acquisition of Sybex is likely to turn out to be major coup for SOTA to be able to control this strategic technology. Over time the price paid for Sybex will also be far less than the royalties they would have had to pay. The Sybex technology also enables developers of other applications built with legacy business basic applications to move to Microsoft technology. SOTA expects some of these developers of vertical applications will integrate MAS 90 as their core accounting for turnkey vertical market applications. Now that MAS 90W and MAS 90cs are out, the MAS 90 development team will now begin releasing enhancements and/or new modules each quarter beginning in Q4. Upgrades will be provided free to customers who are on the new maintenance plan. SOTA expects this will drive growth in services revenues from 10% to 25% or more of total revenues. (Great Plains and PSQL have 40 and 50% of their revenues in services.) This will also provide more predictability to SOTA's revenues and earnings going forward. A major new customization module to be released in Q4 will also be a significant new revenue generator. Full integration with Microsoft Office 97 will also be provided in Q4. The next shoe to drop in SOTA's march to mid-range dominance will be Acuity release 2.0 expected in late September. It will include the full integration of industry leader Proamics cost accounting software. The full release will complete full solutions for a variety of service industries. Stay tuned.

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