Monday, 12 March 2012

Expense Management ; Extensity

Extensity / 2200 Powell St., Suite 300, Emeryville, CA 94608 / (510) 594-5700 / [http://www.extensity.com] www.extensity.com

PARENT COMPANY: Geac Computer Corp. (GAC.TO)

EMPLOYEES: 140*

*Extensity employees before the acquisition by Geac

Elizabeth Ireland

SVP, Marketing, Geac Enterprise Solutions

Was SVP, Marketing, at Extensity. Responsible for all product marketing (pricing, positioning, strategy) for the Extensity suite of applications. Had been a VP at MapInfo and, earlier, a CPA.

Mark Oney

SVP, Front Office Engineering, Geac Enterprise Solutions

Was SVP, Engineering, at Extensity. Heads Geac Americas front- office engineering organization, including the Extensity product line. Worked at Apple and Xerox.

Products

Extensity 6 is the latest version of the core offering - modules include Expense Reports, Timesheets, Travel Plans, Check Requests, Procurement, Extensity Connect (a dashboard, or interface), and Extensity Reporting (for business intelligence, powered by Business Objects). Also: Extensity System Administration Tool (for self- maintenance).

Gobbled Up, but Not Forgotten

Now that Extensity is no longer independent, but rather a division of enterprise-software company Geac, users might be forgiven for wondering to whom to make out this month's check. Except no one seems fazed.

If anything, UCLA's Rebecca Beatty suggests, "recently the support's been even a little bit better than before." During her 1999 implementation, Extensity switched out the lead person she'd been expecting to work with. "We never got that person back. It was a difficult period."

The state university signed a contract in mid-1998 (and UCLA's purchase order came the following year) but the first user didn't go live until 2002. (Extensity won out "because Concur wouldn't let us talk to a customer until we'd signed a contract"; Extensity provided a site visit.) Even now, only a fraction of the campus is on the system. "It's been a hard road, and difficult," she says.

Extensity "didn't quite understand what they were getting into with a university setting - and we didn't understand either." In the business world, for example, approvals by proxy "are the exception; in an academic environment they're the norm. Faculty don't do their own expense reports; they have others do it." As a result, "we've had to do a lot of customization," but despite it all, Beatty feels confident her 11,000 pending users will be up and running by year's end.

Office Depot's Cathy Kollman (a member of Extensity's customer- advisory board) says that "when I had issues they'd get their highest level people on it - but sometimes it took a little longer than I wanted." For Ball Corp.'s Mona Heffernan, there's "a little bit of control over the system that we wish we had. The kinds of fields the user will see, for example - we can't do that ourselves." It's frustrating, she says, that "we have to go to Extensity for that."

CH2M Hill's Mike Walker says his firm "was just going to recode an in-house application when we stumbled across Extensity" in 2000, but now a 5,000-seat license is held up at just 100 users. "It's not rolled out for a number of reasons," Walker says. Mostly, though, it's "because the cost of rolling it out - the user-education cost - is massive." To be of any use to them at all, he says, the system "requires a 90-minute training session."

Spirent Controller Phil Walton agrees: "It's education that's the bottleneck now - not the technology."

Spirent's Walton Says configurability cuts both ways.

"All the set-ups are in there, but to set them up takes a lot of time and focus."

Other Financials**

Total assets $43.6M

Stockholders' equity $33.0M

Cash & equivalents $35.2M

Long-term debt None

Accumulated deficit -$114M

Market value at 3/24 N.A.

**AS OF sept 30, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED; Company acquired march 6 by Geac

Includes short-term investments

running at a loss

extensity OPERATING RESULTS*

2002YTD* 2001A 2000

Revenue $14.3M $35.1M $24.9M

Gross margin 49.2% 57.6% 37.2%

Operating loss -$14.3M -$28.6M -$39.6M

Net loss -$13.6M -$26.0M -$34.5M

Net margin -95.2% -74.0% -138.8%

Earnings per share -0.55 -$1.09 -$1.63 R&D expenditure $5.6M $12.0M $14.1M

*Fiscal year ends Dec. 31; 2002 ytd RESULTS REFLECT FIRST 9 MONTHS

A2001 includes $6.2M restructuring, other one-time charges

Sources: 10K Wizard, company reports

Reference Checks

UCLA

Rebecca Beatty

Dir., Business Services, Corp. Finance

(310) 794-8688

Project: University has gone live with 1,000 of intended 12,000 users.

Office Depot

Cathy Kollman

Director, Accounts Payable

(561) 438-3335

Project: World's second-largest office-supply chain successfully cut back its 4-to-6-week reimbursement time. Just upgraded to version 6.

Rohm & Haas

Henry Good

Dir., Travel and Insurance

(215) 592-3132

Project: The chemical producer signed a three-year contract to run Version 6 on a hosted basis directly with Extensity.

CH2M HILL

Mike Walker

Director, I.T.

(720) 286-2112

Project: Global project-delivery firm needed both time and expense reporting, Web-based access, and an offline client. Running 5.6.1.

Spirent Communications

Phil Walton

Controller

(818) 598-4024

Project: Network-technology company rolled out Extensity 6 to its North American divisions over the last few months; moving on to Europe next quarter and Asia after that.

Ball Corp.

Mona Heffernan

Director, Business Analysis

(303) 460-5507

Project: Packaging provider and aerospace company split its deployment - version 5.6 for aerospace division and 6.0 to the rest of the company.

Marconi

Sharon Bailey

Director of Accounting

(817) 575-2307

Project: Former Reltec division was one of the original beta testers, and is only now upgrading from Extensity 1.0.9 to version 6.

Executives listed here are all users of Extensity's software. Their willingness to talk has been confirmed by Baseline.

1 comment:

  1. It is over my head, I had come here for gathering some information about expense tracking software but I don't know what is happening here and why?

    ReplyDelete