Press Releases
Just For You Software Develops Sydney Festival’s ERP Solution on InterSystems CACHÉ in Just One Year
Organisation-Wide System Tailored to the Needs of Event Management Organisations Now Available for Resale
Sydney, Australia – December 6, 2006 – InterSystems Corporation and Australian developer Just For You Software today announced that the Sydney Festival has deployed a custom-built enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, developed in one year on InterSystems CACHÉ, to replace seven separate software applications. The system, available for resale, is designed to meet the needs of any event management organisation.
The leading database provider in healthcare, InterSystems develops and markets the CACHÉ post-relational database and Ensemble rapid integration software.
The Sydney Festival commissioned Just For You Software 12 months ago to develop the new solution, called Planning and Organisation System for Events (POSE), to meet increased governance and risk management requirements. The brief was to replace seven disparate systems used by different groups of employees with a single integrated enterprise-wide solution to be used by the organisation’s entire staff.
Just For You Software delivered a production management module within four months, and modules for event planning, people management, VIP management, organisational contacts, and sponsorship management followed within a year. One remaining module, travel and accommodation, will be deployed after the 2007 Sydney Festival.
The Sydney Festival also evaluated an off-the-shelf ERP solution. However, its customisation cost alone to meet the Sydney Festival’s requirements was comparable to the entire POSE solution running on InterSystems CACHÉ. Adding licensing costs made the off-the-shelf ERP system more than twice as expensive.
It was also part of the brief that any new software could be deployed on the Sydney Festival’s existing three-year-old hardware infrastructure and maintained by a non-technical person. Because the POSE application was developed and deployed on InterSystems CACHÉ, it met the requirement of running without the need for administration or additional hardware costs.
The 2007 Sydney Festival [www.sydneyfestival.org.au] runs for 22 days from 6-27 January 2007 and features 781 artists from 15 countries giving 272 performances, 50 of which will be free, to an anticipated audience of 1 million people.
Ian Marks, Manager of Accounts and IT Services for the Sydney Festival, said there is increasing pressure on performing arts companies to manage and assess risk, particularly from government funding agencies. “Not only do you have to deliver high quality art, you have to have strong governance and corporate control.”
“The biggest outcome POSE gives us is improved information communications across the organisation,” said Marks. “The software has given us the ability to plan a festival from conceptual stage through to delivery. Previously we could only plan for delivery.
“It is very much an enter once, use many times system,” he said. “Staff can see the overall flow of the festival in a graphical way now, so they can identify things like potential clashes early on. Our production staff, for example, can get a feel for the festival much earlier than before and start work earlier.
“It means we have much better quality control over things earlier in the planning process. We can identify pitfalls in the early stages and avoid significant budget blow-outs at the other end.”
There are also additional financial benefits to the Sydney Festival apart from the lower initial cost, with the Festival and Just For You Software agreeing to share revenues from additional sales of the custom-built POSE solution.
The POSE system has been designed to meet the requirements of any event management organisation, including sports as well as arts organisations. With a second customer already signed up, the Sydney Festival will enjoy ongoing dividends as Just For You Software takes advantage of new business opportunities.
“Every client comes to me with a tall wishlist but a short budget, and my biggest challenge is to deliver everything they want without sending either of us broke,” said Tom Grimshaw, Founder and Director of Just For You Software.
“The Sydney Festival have achieved far more than this,” said Grimshaw. “They have met their requirements while helping us build an application other organisations can also benefit from. It’s a real partnership. Last month we fired off a cheque to Ian. We think it will be the first of many.”
“The Sydney Festival and Just For You Software have shown how a solution based on CACHÉ’s rapid application development and low-maintenance deployment environment can be far more cost-effective than an off-the-shelf solution,” said Denis Tebbutt, Managing Director for InterSystems in Australia. “It’s an ideal combination for small-medium organisations with specialised needs, many of which have not traditionally been well served by large solutions vendors.”
About InterSystems
InterSystems Corporation is a privately-held US$200,000,000 company with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. and offices in 22 countries. InterSystems CACHÉ® is a high performance object database that makes applications faster and more scalable. InterSystems Ensemble® is a rapid integration platform that enriches applications with new functionality, and makes them connectable. InterSystems HealthShare™ is a platform that leverages existing healthcare applications to rapidly create regional or national electronic health records.
InterSystems is the predominant vendor of database and integration software for healthcare applications. CACHÉ and Ensemble are used as the core technology for clinical applications in thousands of hospitals around the world, including all U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and U.S. Department of Defense hospitals, and the Kaiser Permanente network. Leading software vendors who build clinical application products with InterSystems' technologies include Epic Systems, GE Healthcare, Misys Healthcare, QuadraMed, and many more. For more information, visit InterSystems.com.
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Editorial Contact
David Sanday
Bowes Communications
02 9387 2333
david.sanday@bowespr.com
