A Buyers' Guide: High-End Accounting Software
Dennis Keeling · Journal of accountancy online/Journal of accountancy · 1996
A review of the leading products available in this market. The developers of high-end accounting software and the users of that software too often march to a different drummer. The users chief financial officers, controllers and other accountants of very large organizations want their computers to deliver useful financial and marketing information, not spew out reams of raw data. They want succinct forecasts, not voluminous spreadsheet tables; practical business advice, not dense financial statements. In short, users want--and need--flexible, functional and friendly systems. And they want these software applications on a variety of computer operating systems--not just large, expensive mainframe computers. The developers, on the other hand, while not totally ignoring customers' needs, appear more focused on the wizardry of the computer: client/server and object-oriented technologies, for example. While these technologies ultimately enhance the power and flexibility of software, their utility usually is not immediately apparent to most users. In the last few years, however, some major vendors have begun to hear and to act on their pleas for friendly, practical and powerful applications that run both on huge mainframes and midsize computers, whose popularity grows as mainframes' future dims. This article reviews the major shifts in the high-end accounting software market and looks at the leading products in this arena. OPERATING SYSTEMS In the early' 1990s, recognizing that mainframes' star was on the wane and that much of their business depended on it, developers of high-end accounting software decided they had to move quickly to survive. For years, all mainframe technology was closed--that is, it was inflexible and proprietary, unique to particular hardware. As a result, users were boxed in: In most cases, they could use only the application written for the operating system designed for that particular mainframe. But as powerful and cheaper midsize computers rushed into the market, software developers, in a move to grab a share of this fast-growing plum, hurriedly rewrote their products' programs so they' could run on multiple operating systems. The swing to so-called open systems won immediate applause from customers who wanted to be free to shop for applications best suited to their needs rather than struggle to adapt themselves to the peculiarities of the hardware vendors' software. On top of that, the recent management pressure to downsize and reengineer added immediacy to the desire for flexible open systems-along with the recognition that many of the less-efficient procedures of large organizations stemmed from the inherent inefficiencies of their financial software. Hardware manufacturers read the handwriting on the wall, too. They recognized that if they failed to heed the call for open systems, their future--already jeopardized by the growing popularity of midsize machines--would be bleak. For example, it is clear that the specialized software for computers such as IBM's mainframes and AS/400 and Digital Equipment's VAX are giving way to open systems such as Microsoft NT and Unix. Exhibit 1, below, compares the operating systems currently being used by large companies' finance departments and what they plan to move to in the near future. The AS/400, one of the most popular midrange computers that once operated only on IBM's proprietary software, now runs under applications from major software vendors such as SAP, PeopleSoft and J. D. Edwards. The hottest entry in the open system market is Microsoft's NT. In just over one year it clearly has become the most popular choice for midrange applications. Unix, on the other hand, has been at the starting gate for some years, but its growth has been hobbled by its failure to come up with a single unified design; currently, there are several flavors of Unix, each proprietary to a different hardware manufacturer. …