Ecometry offers new platform promises

Its merger failed, e-commerce firm aims at Unix, NT future for 3000 customers

Instead of receiving millions in cash by selling itself to Syngistix, HP 3000 e-commerce app provider Ecometry is facing another season of reaching into its own pockets while it retools for non-3000 platforms.

The leading source of new HP 3000 installations through 1999, the Florida-based firm has been grappling with a slowed economy that’s forced the company to spend its own cash to counter red ink in the e-commerce industry. At the recent e3000 Solutions Symposium, CEO John Marrah assured customers there’s enough money on hand — more than $35 million in the bank — to carry the company through hard times, even without the merger with Syngistix.

“Ecometry will continue with our strategy,” Marrah said. “This really is not a significant change for our objectives. We’ll look at consolidating our marketplace. There’s great deals in some of the other software companies in our market. There’s a Number Two competitor you can take off the street for $8 million today.”

Despite such bravado before the merger deadline arrived, Marrah acknowledged his company was planning on being purchased by Syngistix, a distribution software firm selling Unix and NT solutions.

“There is no doubt we expected the transaction to take place,” Marrah said. “We knew there was risk, which is why we went forward with a second offering [to take the company private] and got approval of that from our shareholders.”

Even with the full support of the merger by Ecometry shareholders, Syngistix was not able to pull together $10 million in financing to assemble the $36 million needed to buy the outstanding Ecometry shares at its offer of $2.90 per share. Executing its backup plan, Ecometry pulled itself off the NASDAQ on May 31, buying an undisclosed number of shares — the founders held 35 percent of the stock — at $2.70 per share.

A week before the merger failed to close, Ecometry reported $1.9 million in losses for its first quarter on revenues of $5.9 million. The revenues dropped 3.9 percent from last year’s first quarter, while the losses were 63 percent higher than that 2001 period. License fees from third party software and hardware revenues — the latter including HP 3000 system sales — increased by more than $400,000 over the prior year.

Marrah said Ecometry was in the process of buying itself off the stock market when Syngistix “came along later in the game. When Syngistix couldn’t execute [its purchase] in a timeframe acceptable to us, we executed the buyback we’ve been looking forward to for quite some time.”

Becoming a privately-held firm once more “won’t change anything at all” about the company’s plans to move its software to the HP-UX and Windows NT platforms. Coach, the leather goods firm with both retail and online shopping outlets, went live with the Windows NT version of Ecometry this spring, along with Precision Response, Bluewater Books and Charts, Steeda, Wine Watch and King Schools.

But these NT customers haven’t ever operated HP 3000 versions of the Ecometry application suite. Marrah said 3000 sites “are all talking about transitioning, but we wanted to get some new customers under our belt and get automated conversion tools to take the existing customers over. We plan to start those conversion processes in the beginning of 2003.”

Hickory Farms will be waiting until at least 2005 to decide how to make a shift in its Ecometry platform. “Hickory Farms is too big for NT,” said IT manager Dan Buckland, who also heads up the Ecometry user group. “We will wait for three to four years before making a decision. Questions we will ask then are how well is Ecometry running on Unix? No one is live yet. Are there other applications available that have comparable features and functions? Where will HP’s priorities be in four to five years?”

Ecometry is planning rolling out a Version 7 of its suite for HP 3000 sites, a release that it hopes to make available by this month. A Version 8, which includes database changes and is scheduled for 2003, won’t be released for MPE. Marrah said “We just can’t make those changes in the IMAGE database,” for Version 8.

The clear majority of Ecometry customers have a distinct window for making a transition to a non-3000 platform, however. Nearly all of the firms are seasonal businesses whose high seasons lead up to Christmas, so making a change to NT or Unix will have to be a springtime or summer project. Marrah estimates of those customers who will move from the HP 3000, only 20 percent will choose the HP-UX implementation of Ecometry.

Marrah said the company will lay out “conversion plans and processes, and costs associated for those, at the August Ecometry world conference.” He promised briefings at the August 18-21 conference in Delray Beach, Fla. on platform performance statistics. Tests earlier this year showed that customers would need twice the computing power on other platforms to match the HP 3000 installations. Ecometry is hoping to report at the conference about a breakthrough with a new customer who took delivery on an HP 3000, with intent to go live on another platform in the fall.

In the meantime, Ecometry customers are continuing to purchase N-Class and A-Class HP 3000s as upgrades to their existing systems. Ecometry officials said some customers could elect to make a switch in platforms as late as 2005, after Version 8 and later releases have been proven by new, non-3000 customers.

“You don’t want to rush off and change platforms right now,” said Les Johnson at this spring’s Solutions Symposium. “As existing clients, I’m sure you’d rather have us bring a few new clients live on this first, rather than convert yourselves.”

Bridging to other platforms

One tool the company expects to help in transitions comes from Taurus Software and Quest Software, which licensed its Bridgeware data migration solution for use at sites moving IMAGE/SQL data onto Oracle or SQL Server databases. These non-3000 databases are working in parallel with HP 3000 data servers in the new Universal Data Interchange (UDI) technology from Ecometry.

BridgeWare will help extract, transform and load data from Ecometry’s Commerce Engine — the main database which in nearly all cases is IMAGE/SQL, along with a few SQL Server installations — to the SQL Server database that runs Ecometry’s Parallel WebShopper application and/or its Point of Sale Replication Server.

Marrah said Ecometry wants to extend the reach of retail enterprise with new applications such as Parallel Web-Shopper and POS Replication Server. This n-tier architecture is also supposed to add a level of redundancy “to ensure continuity in case of back-end server failure or telecommunications failure.”

Taurus President Cailean Sherman explained that BridgeWare’s track record as a cross-platform data exchange facility made the software a good fit to push Ecometry’s IMAGE data onto these parallel platforms.

“It’s not easy for some platforms to bolt on a relational application,” she said, “and BridgeWare is unique in its power to exchange data in real time. It’s ideal for supporting Web servers that could reside anywhere on the Internet.”

Quest’s MPE Business Unit Manager John Saylor said that “BridgeWare delivers efficient data movement from the back-office central customer database to the middle tier replication server in real time. Quest is proud to provide Ecometry customers with a competitive advantage by enabling them to enhance the shopping experience with improved response times.”