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Telecommunications Opportunity
He expects that telecommunications firms will be the next big opportunity as they cope with multiple payment plans, plus a wide variety of sales such as video on demand and ring tones. When mobile phones are used as payment devices at counters and vending machines, the complexity will only increase.
Faster change will be good for the two companies, he added.
“When things are static you can live with the current environment. You occasionally add a new product, but when the accounting treatments are dynamic and the business models and types of transactions are dynamic, the current way of doing business and accounting for it will just be untenable.”
The financial crisis also showed that banks, and many other corporations, did not have the tools to look down to the transaction level of the business quickly to identify problems. “We know what is happening in our book of business but we can’t readily discern where or why,” they realized, according to Lovett. The ERP system gave total numbers, but not the detailed view required for action.
“Manufacturers were asking if they had a good grasp of where their problems were the worst and where they were just beginning to see some softness in the market,” he said.
Government also has high potential because a large agency can have six to eight hops from budget to balance sheet. Many federal agencies have been unable to achieve a clean audit because they can’t show a complete picture of their finances from the agency’s books to its records with the U.S. Treasury. Given that a budget item may be spread over years and invoices from thousands of vendors may trickle in over the program’s life and beyond, that shouldn’t be too surprising.
”Being able to manage and maintain the balance and control process is a nightmare because the numbers are so large and they have such high volumes” said Lovett. “We did a demo for one agency and they said they had been looking for something like this for years.”
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