Event Summary
"MONROVIA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 18, 2000--Software Technologies Corp.
(STC) announced the filing by the company of a Registration Statement with the
Securities and Exchanges Commission relating to the proposed initial public
offering of up to $100 million of its common stock.
STC
will use the net proceeds from the proposed offering for general corporate purposes
and to repay $10 million under a long-term note. All shares are being sold by
the company.
STC,
located in Monrovia, is a leading provider of e-Business integration software
that enables the seamless flow of information within and among enterprises on
a global basis. STC's comprehensive e*Gate software suite provides companies
with a flexible and easily configurable platform to connect applications and
systems within and among enterprises.
The
STC solution provides customers with the flexibility to implement and adapt
their business strategies in response to market dynamics and pursue new business
initiatives to enhance revenue, profit, and customer service.
Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter will act as the lead underwriter of this offering and Merrill
Lynch & Co. and Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette will act as co-managers."
Market
Impact
Most of the major Enterprise Application Integration vendors are currently privately
held. This development should allow STC some maneuvering room against the competition,
and allow them to fund development efforts on their eGate EAI suite.
This
follows news of a success for STC on an implementation at Petsmart Inc. (a Phoenix-based
pet supply chain), where the eGate product was used to integrate SAP R/3 with
Point-Of-Sale systems from NCR Corporation. In order to complete the integration,
Petsmart tied SAP and the NCR system into an Oracle 8 database and used eGate
to marry the application programming interfaces together. The time required
to process store transactions into the ERP system was reduced from 12 hours
to 2 hours. According to Petsmart officials, between reduced system maintenance
costs and the lower cost of processing transactions, Petsmart will save $3.5
million dollars over five years.
User
Recommendations
Customers evaluating enterprise application integration systems should include
STC on a long list of possible EAI vendors.
Any
vendor considered should be strongly questioned on the experience of their consulting
staff, as EAI applications always require custom programming to marry the disparate
applications together. Using consultants already familiar with the integration
software can greatly reduce the time required to implement the solution.