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Pegasus XRL claims Excel software satisfaction prize

For the first time, Sift Media's Business Software Satisfaction Awards paid public tribute to the growing community of programs that use and support Excel as a financial reporting application. The winner in the category for Excel-based software was Pegasus XRL, by the shortest of noses from Rugged Logic's online spreadsheet modelling and forecasting service. John Stokdyk reports

Pegasus XRL is based on Serduct technology originally developed by the Australian software house Lasata. The Serduct tool plugs into transactional database and extracts the data in a format that can be used with Excel pivot tables for summary reporting and analysis across different categories. In 2006 Lasata became part of Systems Union alongside SunSystems and Pegasus and ofter yet another bout of consolidation shortly afterwards, it now sits within Infor's Performance Management Division.

The Business Software Satisfaction Award for Pegasus XRL should be considered as a joint prize alongside the SunSystems Vision reporting tool, which predated Pegasus XRL. But Pegasus users predominated in the overall voting, so the award will head for the company's Kettering base. Perhaps they could send it down to their Sun colleagues in Farnborough halfway through the year.

The Excel category was one of the closest of the 19 categories. Pegasus XRL gained 3.4 out of 4 and Rugged Logic 3.3. XL Cubed came third with 3.1.

At the awards ceremony, Rugged Logic founder Geoff Bristow found the detailed analysis in the 2007 Business Software Satisfaction Award Winners Annual (8.3Mb PDF download) very instructive.

He noted that where Pegasus XRL had attained 3.4 in the individual ratings for ease of use, functionality, reliability and value for money, Rugged Logic's system had scored 3.6 for functionality, 3.3 for reliability and ease of use, and 3.2 for value for money. "That tells me something about our pricing," he commented and suggested that the company would be reviewing its pricing structure.

Sage Intelligent Reporting, a similar reporting tool to the Pegasus tool based around Sage's IntelligentApps acquisition, boasted a respectable 17% share of the survey sample, but only achieved a score of 2.7 - the same satisfaction rating of Microsoft's Balanced Scorecard Manager, which this week was rolled into the company's wider PerformancePoint Server business intelligence application.

A tight fight also occurred in the tax & practice category, where Drummohr's Tax Assistant (3.6) defeated the Excel-based accounts production system from VT Software (3.5) by the narrowest of margins.

With voting for Excel tools concentrated in the specialist category, the business intelligence/performance management award nominations went to Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects. The award went to Cognos.

Related material
The full results and issues such as consolidation, integration and software as a service are covered in more detail in the 60-page awards guide, which can be downloaded for free from the Business Software Satisfaction Awards website.

Also see:
Business Software Satisfaction Awards 2007 results
Software satisfaction: 'What customers want to see is communication'
Small firms win big at the Business Software Satisfaction Awards
Beyond recognition: success at the Business Software Satisfaction Awards
Ode to the Awards. By Barry Cryer OBE

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