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Software Satisfaction Awards - Payroll, HR, paperless and business intelligence. By John Stokdyk

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19th Sep 2007
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2007 Software Satisfaction AwardsThe Business Software Satisfaction Awards organised by Sift Media not only polled AccountingWEB members, they attracted nearly 2,000 responses from members of FinanceWeek.co.uk, TrainingZone.co.uk, HRZone, MyCustomer.com and BusinessZone.

There were 19 separate software categories, plus an opportunity for participants to rate their software resellers. Accountancy's front runners were covered in a separate article, as were several Excel-based contenders and the nominees in the CRM categories.

This article examines the contenders in the payroll, HR, paperless office and business intelligence/corporate performance management categories. Further details of all the nominees are available from the Business Software Satisfaction Awards website.

Payroll
Aside from accounting and tax/practice applications, payroll was one of the most hotly contested categories, with more than 500 responses. The voting was very broad in the specialist payroll category, with big international names such as Sage and Intex (now part of IRIS) lined up against smaller players such as Qtac, Superpay and Moneysoft. This reflects a user spectrum that can range from multinational departments to bookkeepers and HR manager who run standalone applications. Sage and IRIS both had large numbers of users, but failed to make it through to the final nominations, which were shared appropriately enough between an SME-focused developer, MoneySoft, Pegasus Opera II Payroll, which concentrates on the UK mid-market, and QuickBooks payroll from the Canadian-based multinational Intuit.

Integrated payroll/HR
Many companies treat payroll as an HR function, and the tools they use will be closely linked to employee attendance and remuneration records held in integrated HR programs. The IRIS Business Suite is designed for smaller companies and was the contender with the largest user base, and was one of the category nominees. The other contenders were drawn from a group of corporate and mid-range software who are slugging it out against each other in a very competitive UK market. ASR and Midland made it into the nominations, with Snowdrop, Frontier and Topaz prominent among the also-rans.

Enterprise HR
With a select group of corporate organisations taking part in the survey, the Business Software Satisfaction Awards provide an opportunity to assess the merits of the big global enterprise software houses Oracle and SAP. In the HR sector, SAP gained a nomination alongside Northgate and Vizual.

One of the central issues illuminated by the Software Satisfaction Awards was whether software consolidators could sustain the satisfaction levels of customers who used software from the companies that were acquired. With the exception of a small, but creditable vote from PeopleSoft users, SAP's Enterprise HR nomination (plus two in the CRM categories) confirmed that it is achieving better satisfaction scores than Oracle, which may be a natural outcome of SAP's more consistent internal development process when compared with Oracle's acquisition-based growth strategy. This pattern could also be discerned in lowish scores from users of Snowdrop, which was bought this year by Sage.

Business intelligence (BI)/Corporate performance management (CPM)
Yet there are exceptions to the "consolidation is bad for users" hypothesis. Hyperion, now an Oracle subsidiary, was nominated in this category alongside the two other giants of business intelligence, Cognos and Business Objects. Outlooksoft, which SAP acquired earlier this year, failed by a narrow margin to reach the 5% threshold that was set to ensure that the nominations were based on statistically significant samples. Adaptive Planning, the online planning application, and Inca Planning, an Excel-based SME planning tool developed in the UK were among the smattering of tools represented that were not owned by Microsoft, Infor and Sage, the international software groups that are challenging the big three of a piece of the BI action.

Paperless office
Voting in the 2007 Software Satisfaction Awards indicates that electronic document management is still something of a minority interest among the wider UK business population and in numerical terms, the large contingent of practitioners from AccountingWEB were evident in rating the paperless capabilities of IRIS Practice Management, MYOB Singleview and PracticeEngine's Rapport. But their votes were not enough to gain nominations, where Business-Work-Ware represents the professional services specialists against Invu, a general purpose SME paperless office application, and Version One, a more sophisticated suite that integrates with numerous ERP and financial applications. Version One, it should be noted, now counts as one of the consolidated, having been acquired this year by COA.

The results in all 19 categories will be revealed on the evening of 9 October at an evening ceremony at The Brewery, London EC1.

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