Market Position:

SharpOWL™ has significantly matured over the last twelve months, and stands in an excellent position as a PSA market leader in Europe. With the company's focus on delivering best-of-breed solutions pertaining to the financial management of services organizations, coupled with its close partnership with Microsoft for the management of people and projects, SharpOWL has excelled in growing its share of the PSA market. Throw in its already close partnership with Systems Union, the global supplier of SunSystems back-office financial solutions, (and fast developing relationships with other market leading financial solution providers) SharpOWL is being considered by a significant number of services-based organizations.

Even though SharpOWL has not focused its marketing efforts in North America, the company has seen rapid exposure on this side of the pond, and is one that is being seriously considered now by a number or organizations.

Survey Results:

The survey showed that SharpOWL excelled where it traditionally has - in the financial management of services organizations. The solution had the fastest payback in the survey (of approximately three months) and the highest ROI in the study. This success was predicated on the highest (when compared to the others in this survey) annual benefits in the survey. As to be expected SharpOWL's users rated the solution highest in areas associated with better financial management .

Table: SharpOWL Key Survey Business Benefits

Business Benefit Score:

Reduced unaccounted time 8.0
Reduced time and expense processing 8.0
Increased resource utilization 7.3
Reduced cost of doing business 7.0
Reduced revenue leakage 6.8

Source: Aberdeen Group, November 2001

Areas where SharpOWL did not score as well as some of its competitors were where the company has only recently used partnerships to begin broadening its product line - project and resource management through its relation with Microsoft®. In the past, organizations that have selected SharpOWL typically have done it to enhance their financial reporting capabilities that require professionals to better manage the financial aspect of their business, rather than organizations that have the immediate need to optimize resources. As the Microsoft project and resource capabilities are integrated with SharpOWL, the solution will only provide higher returns to its customers.

The integration to the next release of Microsoft® Project will ensure that Enterprise outline codes used in Project match the coding structures used in SharpOWL to guarantee consistent viewing of information. The integration will also ensure that other static data common to the 2 systems (e.g. resources, skills and projects) can be maintained through a central function. SharpOWL will also add significant value to Project by enhancing its multi-currency functionality for multiple site international deployment.

SharpOWL's existing time capture process, already strong in project accounting terms, will be enhanced to provide necessary project data such as "estimate to complete" and so enable a single time capture process for both billing purposes and for project control.

Project data will also be available through the relationship management modules of SharpOWL to give project status visibility to non-project managers.

Project based resources management will be capable through the next release of Project while a separate SharpOWL module will provide an Outlook calendar based resource management capability. The combination of the two will give the many companies that work with both Project and Outlook type calendars the best of both worlds

Figure: SharpOWL Summary Results


User Feedback:

Aberdeen's discussions with SharpOWL customers show that the company is committed to the management of the project time and costs, and especially to offering customizable solutions that meet the diverse requirements of services organizations, even within the same organization. Most SharpOWL users had a deep understanding of the benefits that the solution provides, which showed up in such a high ROI for the solution. They also appreciated the vendor's move to integrating project and resource management into the solution, giving them the full suite of functionality required to better run their organizations.

Aberdeen Conclusions:

In the past twelve months SharpOWL has burst on to the PSA scene, becoming a European market leader in PSA. And while SharpOWL has had significant success overseas, the company has not moved much of its focus over to the extensively large market of North America. Aberdeen predicts that this focus is not to far off in the future, and once it occurs, SharpOWL will be seen as an excellent solution for service organizations over in the U.S.

SharpOWL's users got what they paid for - results. The vendor showed that by providing solutions that focus on the financial aspect of services organizations first, users would gain significant financial benefits over the long term. And now with SharpOWL's expanded functionality being added in, the company is positioned to become an emerging market leader in PSA.

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