Product Description

“Attaché 7 fills the huge gap in the market for SME’s outgrowing Myob and QuickBooks who are not ready for the expense and disruption of SQL based big business software. We believe the medium term market for Attaché 7 is 100,000 customers in Australia alone.” John McKinstry, NEM * (see footnote)

Most SME business software (like Myob) was installed over 6 years ago to solve issues like Y2K and GST. Many of these businesses have now evolved, but few can afford the step up to SQL based systems with typical upfront costs of $30,000 - $100,000 plus high maintenance and support costs.

Today, a similar Attaché 7 system could be just $400 per month and take only days to install.

Developed at a cost of over $10 million, 1,500 Attaché 7 sites have already been installed since October 2006, with a target of 6,000 by June 2007. Attaché 7 actually consists of three components:

1. Accounts & Payroll software – very strong in order processing, stock control, departmental reporting, with ‘bullet proof’ reliability, high speed data entry, seamless Microsoft Office integration and scaleable to 100 users.

2. Alex – a unique ‘green’ document manager that lets you fax and email invoices, statements, pay advices etc (with batching and tracking) saving time, stationery and improving cash flow. The Alex savings alone should reduce the Attaché 7 cost to nothing!

3. Fast Track – ‘pay-as-you-use’ pricing that includes maintenance, the database, plus optional phone support and classroom training, all for a small monthly amount that may be stopped with just 60 days notice.

“With over 18 years of experience in small enterprise software, we have yet to see a product so strongly dominate this space. Attaché 7 has all the features a growing business requires. We are upgrading clients at 5 – 6 a week with names like Sydney Aquarium, Hanna Match Group, Prince of Wales Medical Research Foundation and Soccer Australia.” …… Deryc Turner, Attkey Computer Solutions - Sydney

* nem is a 30 partner business development and research firm who, amongst other things, conducted surveys with IT consultants, users, accountants and bankers

Innovation

Attaché 7 may be described by all of the Innovation indicators.

In the book ‘The Innovators Dilemma’ (often quoted by Yankee Group) technologies are described as ‘sustaining’ i.e. improved price and performance over time; or ‘disruptive’ i.e. dramatically reduces the price and increases the performance, creating a new path that most vendors can’t immediately adopt since it changes their whole economic and technology model e.g. Attaché 7. 

We look at the Attaché 7 ‘Innovation’ through two sets of eyes:

1. Customers

“I believe Attaché 7 has no natural competitors. It enables growing businesses to move to more powerful accounting software at a fraction of the price they previously had to look at paying.” John McKinstry, NEM

After Y2K, our traditional competitors migrated to SQL based systems and chased big businesses. While this market represents the bulk of IT expenditure, it only accounts for about 1% of all businesses. Today, these systems are too expensive and too complex for most SME’s, as are the offerings from SAP, Oracle etc who are trying to move ‘down market’.

Attaché 7 offers the best of all worlds e.g. features you’d see at a SAP B1 presentation, runs on most existing hardware, don’t need to move to SQL, yet it is also ready for Vista, 64 bit technology, low cost broadband and the Internet.

2. Attaché – built to last

After Y2K, Attaché decided to rebuild its business. The previous ‘cash upfront’ model was bad for customers and us, so we moved to ‘pay-as-you-use’ recurring income. We also believed Internet based transaction revenue was a key part of the future – that is what Alex is built around.

We further believed Myob had a lot of things going for it such as ease of use and widespread support, while traditional ‘mid-range’ software was noted for being the opposite. 

So Attaché 7 is built to embrace what is good about products like Myob and then set a new standard in features – especially in areas like sophisticated stock control, network performance, departmental accounting. And being highly scaleable – from 1 to 100 users – Attaché 7 is built to last for both us and our customers.

Performance

Evidence of Attaché 7 exceeding industry and user expectations can be seen in the following ways:

• Research done by the NEM consulting under the direction of John McKinstry – two quotes from him are shown above

• Excitement shown by over 100 business software consultants and accountants at the August 2006 Attaché 7 pre-release

• Excitement shown by the over 4,000 existing Attaché software users who attended the late 2006 roadshows (we had expected only 1,000 attendees)

• Over 1,500 businesses who attended the roadshows have now installed Attaché 7 – our consultants diaries are booked for weeks ahead!

• No material ‘bugs’ have arisen since the first sites were installed

• Attaché 7 users are expressing delight with the new system and there has been no returns

• The release of Attaché 7 saw us being judged by The Financial Review as one Australia and New Zealand’s Top 25 IT vendors to watch in 2007. This is what they said: 

Potential

Evidence of the local and International potential of Attaché 7 can be seen in the following ways:

• Attaché 7 has already doubled local new business revenue in just three months.

• Attaché 7 is on track to double our international revenue over the next 6 months in markets we already have a major presence e.g. New Zealand, South Africa, South Pacific.  Other enquiries have started to come in despite no international advertising e.g. China, UK.

• Right around the World accounting software vendors have built their ‘next step up’ from products like Myob, QuickBooks, Sage etc. around SQL or Oracle based systems. But market uptake has been poor - the total cost of ownership and business disruption is far too high e.g.

• Attaché 7 solves this and market reaction todate proves it! Here’s how we see our potential market in Australia and New Zealand, for example.

    Breakdown of approximately 1.5 million businesses in Australia and New Zealand

Of these 280,000 small to medium businesses, our estimate is 30,000 are immediate potential targets for Attaché 7, with a total potential market of around 100,000. Our current constraint is our inability to install this number of systems and the marketing message that shortens the sales cycle so our consultants energies can focus on installations.

Other information the judges should know

Below is a brief history of Attaché Software, that includes successes, achievements etc.

Attaché Software is often quoted as a local success story that started with a bang and then became a ‘quiet achiever’ for many years. Attaché 7 has put us right back in the ‘spotlight’.

Attaché began in the early 1980’s as the first PC software in the World to be distributed by IBM. The software came in an attaché case (hence the name) and was known for its ‘bullet proof reliability’ – a reputation that continues today.

When affordable PC networks became available in the early 1990’s, we decided to focus on the more sophisticated multi-user market where most of our staff and consultants came from. The small business market was left to packages like MYOB and QuickBooks.

Over recent years we saw many of these businesses were outgrowing these products, but there was no logical next step for them that they liked. Everything (including our own products at the time) appeared too old, expensive, hard to use, required new hardware, would take ages to install etc.

So we created Attaché 7 as the logical next step for what we believed would become the ‘market sweet spot’ for the next generation of accounting software buyers.

We would like to share some of our past achievements and facts with you. We believe it shows Attaché Software had the experience and skills so essential to this massive project:

• Established in 1981, Attaché has stood the test of time

• 100% owned by management in Australia & New Zealand

• One of most strategic and best IT vendors to work with (MIS magazine 2005)

• Just some of the Awards over the last 20 years

  • Top mid-range accounting software (PC World Awards)

  • Quickest mid-range software to implement (Dataquest survey)

  • Twice won ‘Software Product of the Year’(AITA Awards)

  • Software Marketer of the Year (AITA Awards)

• Research and Development Centres in Sydney and Auckland

• Over 200 Attache consultants based in the suburbs to assist our customers

• The lowest ‘total cost of ownership’ of any mid-range software we know of in the World

• Built in relational database - no extra cost or administrators required

• High performance from most existing hardware

• One of the highest customer loyalty ratings – we work hard to ensure our customers never have a reason to leave us