Smith-Gardner adds new PC app for catalogers

Non-store retail application provider Smith-Gardner, which has recently changed the company name to match its lead product Ecometry, announced it has purchased a software company whose products can lead it to small and mid-size customers. S-G purchased Haven Corporation, which makes the DOS- and Windows 2000-based MailOrder Wizard and Castle applications. The company said the transaction “will allow Smith-Gardner to expand its market opportunity and its customer base to include 2,600 small to mid-size direct marketing companies who require an order management and fulfillment system that provides significant functionality at low cost.”

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Smith-Gardner has formed a new subsidiary called NewHaven Software Corp. that will manage MailOrder Wizard and Castle software; Tom Danner was named General Manager. S-G said it supplied source code, sales support and staffing to start up NewHaven. S-G had named COO John Marrah to take its president’s post in August, and also installed Marrah as president of NewHaven, which has six employees. Marrah’s move to the S-G president’s post — he’s also continuing his duties as S-G COO — freed up CEO Gary Hegna for “high-level business strategies and greater involvement in the investor community.”

The S-G stock price remained below $3 a share after the NewHaven announcement; it’s never rebounded from its mid-year slide from $20 a share, related to red-ink announcements for S-G’s second quarter. Third quarter results showed the company posted net profits of $586,000 on sales of $14.1 million — $2.5 million of which was hardware sales including HP e3000s. Hardware sales for the company are still in front of 1999 figures to date, $7.6 million to $6.5 million, but over the first three quarters of the year, S-G is showing a loss of $371,000, compared to profits of $4.4 million last year.

S-G was positioning the NewHaven products as a starter market that could lead to sales of its Ecometry product, hosted on HP 3000s and NT servers. “The customers of NewHaven are in the same market as the customers of Ecometry, though significantly smaller in size,” said a spokesperson for the company. “Smaller companies running Wizard will enjoy a superior level of customer support. Mid-sized companies can look forward to the completion and the subsequent release of the Windows-based Castle Software. And companies on a fast growth track can progress to Smith-Gardner’s Ecometry solution.”

S-G also announced that Ecometry has become a recommended solution in the HP Enterprise Commerce Solution. The HP program is a partnership which certifies and pre-integrates industry-leading personalized e-business applications from BroadVision and other key HP-BroadVision ecosystem partners with mission-critical technologies, services, support and customer education from HP.