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Aqilla - the new kid on the block in hosted financial software

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13th Mar 2007
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Two former Systems Union executives have returned to the financial software market with a company called Aqilla that is developing a web-hosted mid-market business application. John Stokdyk reports.

Colin Christianson was a co-founder of Systems Union and led the development team that created SunSystems. He left in 1999 to set up another company, ncSoft, which was then acquired by Systems Union in 2004. Christianson left Systems Union for good in 2006. His partner, Hugh Scantlebury, was managing director of Foundation Systems and left Systems Union after it was acquired by Infor last year. Previously, he has also worked for Kewill Systems and Sage.

"When Colin left Systems Union and he had the germ of an idea that we had talked about," Scantlebury said. "We share a lot of common values, so this was what I chose to do after I left."

The partners took six months out to research the market for online business software software as a service. Their conclusion, according to Scantlebury, was: "There isn't anything actually very good out there. The more serious players are derived out of CRM offerings, which we don't think is what customers ideally want."

Christianson's vision is for an application that offers more than the basic bookkeeping and accounting services that currently dominate the SaaS marketplace. "We're aiming it to scale from a simple register/sign-up service for real SMEs to what I would call the lower mid-market - especially the classic, multi-location, branch-led organisations that need multiple site deployments," said Scantlebury.

While the application template is designed to be hosted on the web and to hook into external applications, Aqilla will be happy to adapt it for to customers' requirements and allow them to configure it as a standalone, on-premise system - or to switch in the opposite direction with no disruption.

"Colin and I come from an earlier age in the computer industry, where people bought product on merit - and that's what we're about," said Scantlebury. We're self-funded, and very conservative in our expectations and approach and the respect we aim to show customers. We did it at Systems Union, we did it at ncSoft and we will be doing it at Aqilla in a framework that's exclusive of the other noise that goes around the industry.

At the moment, the Aqilla directors are looking to let people know what they are up to, but they will not pre-announce a product until it's ready for public inspection. "We're not looking to launch the product to market until much later in the year. The developers are pretty well down the road in terms o the architecture and initial raft of functionality," Scantlebury said.

"When we're happy, well show the beta version and get feedback. We'll take that on board and reincorporate it into the solution."

The Aqilla approach derives in part from the founders' disillusion with how the industry has stagnated, he added. "A lot of people who bought application software in the past two years are not enamoured of it. The solutions provided to them are overkill for the things they're trying to achieve. We're trying to get back to simplicity - and getting visibility on the organisation's performance is where we want to get to."

The web 2.0 approach can help users break out of this trap. Customers are increasingly aware of issues such as disaster recovery, potential data losses from laptops and other breaches of trust. "As long as access controls are tight, those things go away with hosted applications," Scantlebury said.

"The world is just far too full of third generation applications that have been bent and twisted to work post 2000. Worse though, the world is too full of cash-cow orientated application vendors and people are beginning to be more savvy to such propositions. Customers need and want something different and we will give them something different - real value."

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