New Top Gun at Infinium

On Friday, Infinium hired James McGowan as president and CEO, effective immediately. The company’s founder, Robert Pemberton, is continuing as chairman.

Prior to joining Infinium, McGowan was president and CEO of Portal Connect, which was formerly called EIS Systems, a provider of software for customer service call centers. Before that, he had been president and CEO of Deluxe Data, a developer of electronic funds transfer software. He also spent nearly 20 years at IBM.

Infinium is an application service provider of enterprise resource planning applications. Two weeks ago, the company announced that its loss for the first quarter, ended Dec. 31, of its 2001 fiscal year, narrowed to $900,000 on sales of $22.4 million. In the prior year’s quarter, the company lost $1.5 million on $23.4 million in sales.

Baan Lands KPN Account

Baan sold a license for the iBaan Portal it launched last month to a subsidiary of Dutch telecommunications supplier, KPN. The unit, KPN Netwerk Bouw, will use iBaan for a company-wide information portal to give networked users secure access to applications and business processes. The Dutch company will use the portal to link customers, suppliers, contractors, and employees, and the firm is hoping its use will speed up project development.

KPN is already a client of Baan’s ERP and reporting systems. Meanwhile, KPN is also using Baan’s OpenWorld system to integrate legacy systems and third-party applications.

When iBaan was introduced last month, the company said the system’s features included monitoring of individual employee page views and security access

Weak ERP Market Takes its Toll

Application service provider Intelligroup reported a net loss from continuing operations of $500,000 on sales of $28.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2000. In the fourth quarter of 1999, the company had a net loss from operations of $1.2 million on sales of $31.8 million.

The company’s EBITDA improved to $490,000 from $34,000 in the prior year period. For all of 2000, the company lost $6.7 million on revenue of $112.8 million, compared to a loss of $5.3 million on sales of $146.3 million in 1999.

The company blamed the revenue decline on weak demand in the ERP market and a shift in the firm’s focus to an ASP model. The losses were largely due to costs the firm racked up while it invested in its ASP business.

The company had $1.3 million left on its balance sheet at the end of the year. A year earlier, it had $5.5 million in cash.

Bits and Bytes

• Dell Computer said ADC, a supplier of network equipment, software, and integration services for broadband networks, selected it as its corporate hardware standard. Dell’s PowerEdge servers, OptiPlex desktop systems, Latitude notebooks, and Precision workstations will be deployed throughout ADC’s operations.

• J.D. Edwards said it signed a reseller agreement with human resources software developer LifeMap Communications. LifeMap will be integrated into the human resources applications that are part of J.D. Edwards’ OneWorld XE system.