What have software houses been focusing on in 2010?
FSN
20 December 2010
The uncertainties created by the recession have contributed to a rise in demand for more flexibility from many of the corporate and public sector bodies that use Unit4 systems, so over the next two years, it will deliver a series of upgrades designed to help (what Dobbe describes as) ‘businesses living in change’ to better manage this. ‘ABW has always been about post implementation agility; it’s conceptual,’ asserts Dobbe, but the changes will enhance this ‘agility’ by, for example, making it easier for customers to manage data, process and delivery methodology change, at the business user level. ‘As it’s about independence and about going somewhere new, we’ve called it Route 66,’ says Dobbe.
Taking some of the pain from unavoidable changes, by making systems easier to manage, has also been behind some recent developments at Thomson Reuters. ‘There has never been so much new and complex tax legislation in countries across the world,’ says Jerry Rihll, managing director of Digita, which is part of the tax & accounting business of Thomson Reuters, and this legislation creates a huge compliance burden for corporate tax departments, from technical and administrative points of view. So Thomson Reuters bought a business (Abacus) that developed compliance software for corporate tax departments, and used it as the basis for a solution (OneSource) that makes all of the associated processes easier to manage.
‘When we acquired the Abacus tax business from Deloitte in 2009 it was because we are creating the sort of software that organisations will need in the future,’ states Rihll. ‘Because businesses want to plan their tax compliance from a corporate perspective, finance professionals need to look at international tax compliance through a multi-faceted lens,’ he says, and OneSource facilitates this by simplifying and streamlining the associated processes, and providing a centralised and contextualised view of global tax data, with the support of the OneSource web portal, performance dashboard, and a workflow manager (which is particularly appealing to international organisations).
Back to press cuttings