Software AG (SAG), one of the 20 largest software companies world-wide, continues to grow its business in South Africa, which focuses on application development tools and databases, at an annual rate of 40%. This continued profitable growth had led to SAG and SPL, its partner in sub-Saharan Africa, reaffirming their business commitment to each other, further cementing a 27-year partnership between the two."SAG business contributes a significant portion of SPL's income. The re-signing of the mutual agreement and contracts between our companies in February this year clearly demonstrates the strength of our partnership," comments Schalk Viljoen, Software AG Business Manager at SPL, part of JSE-listed Dimension Data Group."What is even more pleasing is that Software AG has just reported its preliminary results for fiscal 1997, showing a 14% growth, with revenue totalling approximately 725 million DM and pre-tax profit of 50 million DM. This not only confirms the positive trend reported in the mid-year results but proves how Software AG's strategy of focusing on its core competencies is paying off," says Viljoen.For Software AG, the growth stemmed primarily from the traditional product lines ADABAS (databases) and NATURAL (application development tools), with these products contributing approximately 80% to license revenue. The remaining 20% was generated from the middleware product line, ENTIRE. Licences, maintenance fees and professional services each made up about one-third of total revenue.Locally, NATURAL ADABAS, solely supplied by SPL, is well represented in the top sector of the corporate market in South Africa, with clients such as Standard Bank, Liberty Life, Eskom and central, local and provincial government."Looking to the future, we are excited about our renewed relationship with Software AG as the company has shown a very strong turnaround - both financially and from a technical perspective. Software AG plans to grow at least as fast as the industry average and to further increase profitability. "The company's relationship with Microsoft has strengthened, and as a result of this co-operation the middleware product ENTIRE was extended by the DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) technology, ensuring that DCOM can be used as an enterprise-wide integration platform for application systems. SPL plans to launch ENTIRE X in South Africa in May this year.Viljoen says other technology plans for Software AG include launching a new development environment for Web-based business applications at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany in March. This will offer a language environment that is designed specifically for building electronic commerce applications.As an extension of its database product line, Software AG plans to launch a new enterprise server that will support multimedia data and object technologies, once again targeted at the electronic commerce market, at the end of 1998.
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