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R. Savitha

Total Information Management is the way to go, says this software player.

IN today's information age, it's not enough if a company has a law firm to represent it in legal matters and an accountant to keep its books. It needs to put an information management structure in place to take care of all its business needs.

Icode Inc believes it has the right solution in Everest, a software suite targeted at small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country. It is designed to work as an enterprise-wide solution that drives all the critical areas of a business, from bricks to clicks, says the company. These include functions such as marketing and sales, shipping, purchase, inventory and warehouse management, finance, customer relationship, point-of-sale and e-commerce. Icode, a privately-held software company, specialises in business enterprise solutions for firms with one to 1,000 employees in retail, wholesale, distribution, mail order, service and e-commerce.

According to N. Raghavan of Icode, Everest is easy for users to customise and configure, eliminating the need to change lines of code at installation, shortening the average implementation cycle to a few days as against the months usually required when one switches systems. Everest implementation requires about 10 days, says Raghavan.

According to Raghavan, the software has been conceived as a non-modular solution and can accommodate almost every business configuration and environment, from single to multi-location operations to remote connectivity. So no more hassles and no more worries about how to access the data by the time a user crosses to the other side of the world, he says. It is compatible with pocket PCs and Web browsers, giving the user total control and access, regardless of location. Everest, says Raghavan, has been designed as a multi-tier and completely scalable application.

Bijal Mehta, Icode President and Chief Executive Officer, says, "Years of careful research have gone into the making of this software. We interviewed countless companies and organisations. Everest is a fully integrated solution for businesses looking for enterprise software that does more than book-keeping but is less complicated than enterprise resource planning (ERP). Everest is available in four core options: Centralised, E-Commerce Centralised, Distributed and E-Commerce Distributed.

Everest Centralised enables the real-time data of the user company to be stored in a central server, allowing its client connections through either LAN (local area network) or WAN (wide area network). Everest E-Commerce Centralised allows the Web and database servers to reside on the user company's LAN, enabling deployment of the functionality of an e-commerce site right out of the box.

According to Raghavan, Everest Distributed, to be released in early 2002, has been designed for companies with multiple/independent locations, such as the retail industry.

This segment usually witnesses a high volume of transactions and is dependent on WAN connectivity that is cost-prohibitive. In this segment, real-time information from the rest of the organisation is not critical and information is only periodically synchronised between the local database servers.

The last option, E-Commerce Distributed, enables the company's real-time data to be stored on multiple distributed servers, across locations (single publisher server/multiple subscriber servers) and at their Internet Service Provider (ISP) with periodic data synchronisation with each other over the WAN. This allows the user company's e-commerce site to be hosted at an ISP.

Is there any comparable product in the country? "To our knowledge there are no comparable products in India," says Raghavan. But in the US, the company's major market, the competition comes from products such as Great Plains Small Business Manager, QuickBooks, Peachtree, and MYOB.

However, Icode would like to think Everest has the edge because it offers features such as integrated contact management and a global application which is multi-lingual and multi-currency. It supports regional settings, including address and telephone formats, time zones and taxes. Its inventory control helps in tracking, barcode printing, stock areas and item kits. It has an integrated point of sale.

Being marketed as a global product, it is available in seven languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese and English, including both British and American English, he says.

rsavitha@hotmail.com

Please e-mail us at eworld@thehindu.co.in if you have queries on computer usage or if you find an interesting way of using a computer.

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