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Technology Stocks : New Era of Networks (NEON) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: treetopflier who wrote (219)	12/8/1998 12:40:00 PM
From: Emec	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1222

NEON mentioned in this article-that they view HDIE as a serious challenger. :-) From Healthcare to Finance There aren't many software firms with their roots in healthcare that manage to crack the financial markets. But Healthdyne Information Enterprises (HIE), a US company based in Georgia, aims to break that trend. HIE, founded four years ago, has previously focused on providing US healthcare firms with software integration tools - in particular, its Cloverleaf messaging application. Increasingly, however, as investment banks have sought to integrate their legacy systems, HIE has been drawn into the booming market to provide securities firms with middleware: software which allows banks to route and reformat messages between disparate systems and applications. In the last year, HIE has secured a series of sizable contracts with European-based banks and brokerage houses, including WestLB subsidiary Panmure Gordon and Poland's bank Handlowy. Unsurprisingly, more established middleware vendors to the financial markets - such as BEA Systems, Mint, New Era of Networks and Tibco - now view HIE as a serious challenger. HIE's drive into Europe is spearheaded by Alan Rick, director of international sales, who joined the company late last year after spells with Logica, Mint, BIS Banking Systems (later Midas) and consultancy CMG. Rick explains that rather than seeking a direct presence on the ground in all European markets, HIE has sought to forge a series of distribution agreements with established software vendors. In this way, the firm has linked up in the UK with Trace Financial, the messaging specialist behind the Trafic software for Crest, and Symmetry, a South African software house. HIE is also considering smaller tie-ups in France, Germany and the Benelux countries. But last month in the largest deal of its kind, HIE stuck a worldwide marketing agreement with DST, the US firm best known for its mutual fund accounting and portfolio management software. Under the terms of the deal, HIE's version of Cloverleaf for the financial markets will be integrated with DST's portfolio Accounting System. This will allow DST's proprietary software - based at its central service bureau in the US - to automatically "read" messages sent to it by clients in a variety of formats, including the ISITC (Industry Standard for Institutional Trade Communications) format. At the same time, the UK based arm of DST will package and market three of its front-office applications for asset managers alongside Cloverleaf finance. Elsewhere, HIE has been able to steal a march on its rivals with the speed with which it has been able to install its software. Rick says that in the case of Warsaw-based Bank Handlowy, HIE was able to implement an initial interface between the bank's systems and Cloverleaf as a basic "proof of concept" within two days. The $350,000 project entailed integrating a new deal entry system - Reuters' Kondor Plus - with the bank's existing Ibis back-office system, which is based on an IBM AS400 mainframe. The bank aimed to use Cloverleaf to transform and route transaction messages for swaps, foreign exchange and money market loans entered in Kondor for settlement in the back office, where they were entered manually. She says use of Cloverleaf allowed deals entered into Kondor to be processed, reformatted and "enriched" - such as through the addition of settlement and allocation instructions - as if they had been entered directly into the Ibis system. After the initial two-day implementation, HIE then spent a further four weeks rolling out the full installation as well as training bank staff. -From Financial News, 2-8 November, issue 132 (Information Technology