Mid-Comp International Taking Odyssey to the U.S.

by Alex Woodie

Companies in the United States will soon be able to purchase Odyssey, a suite of modular, Java-based ERP software applications designed to easily adapt to customizations without requiring expensive rewrites. Mid-Comp International, the Australian developer of Odyssey, is working with its American business partner, Oz Global Software, to attract consultants and build a network of channel partners and resellers to start selling the software, which should begin by the middle of the year.

OS/400 shops in the United States may have heard of Mid-Comp International via SnapShot/400, a popular performance monitoring tool that Mid-Comp developed, sold through a number of business partners in the United States. For the past five years, the bulk of Mid-Comp's development budget has gone into the ERP suite. The company began rolling the software out to customers in 2002, and today counts four shops in Australia as early adopters, the most prominent being Nintendo Australia, which successfully implemented a service module of the Odyssey suite when upgrades to its green-screen AS/400 ERP system became too expensive.

Company spokespersons say Odyssey has a number of features and capabilities that distinguish it from the crowded mid-market ERP field. The first is platform-independence. The application was conceived around IBM's San Francisco framework for open and compatible software. While IBM eventually lost interest in San Francisco and discontinued the project (setting the Odyssey development effort back at least three months), the Odyssey software maintains the versatility it was originally designed to offer. This versatility includes a thin-client Java interface, the capability to run on any Java-compatible server, and support for all SQL-enabled databases. Odyssey has been tested on a variety of platforms--including Windows and Unix operating systems, Oracle and SQL Server databases, and WebLogic and Tomcat--but the preferred environment is WebSphere, DB2/400, and the iSeries.

Mid-Comp also seeks to distinguish Odyssey on price. Instead of using tier-based pricing--the predominant pricing method, but one that is increasingly attracting the ire of OS/400 users, forced to cough up the cash for upgrades--or user-based pricing, Mid-Comp has taken a flat-rate approach. For $100,000, users get a lifetime license to use Odyssey for any number of users. Maintenance is, of course, extra.

The last differentiator for Odyssey, but perhaps the most important, is its capability to adapt to modifications without requiring users to repeatedly rewrite custom modifications whenever the underlying ERP code is upgraded. Customizations of ERP software are often the culprit behind lengthy and expensive ERP implementations, and can sometimes soak up more than half the cost of an implementation. By separating the core ERP functionality from modifications, through a library of business policies and through using a unified modeling language and code-generation tool called Tsunami, it should take no longer than three months to complete a migration from another ERP package to Odyssey, Mid-Comp says.

The library of plug-in business policies provides a range of business rules that are often the subject of custom programming in other ERP packages, says Mid-Comp's director of product development, Bjarne Matzen. "Our company used to do a lot of J.D. Edwards customizations," he said. "With J.D. Edwards, we would tend to hard-code the modification, and we would make the same modifications for each one."

There are currently between 300 and 400 business policies--such as due-date calculations, credit checks, order-flow policies, and EDI validation policies--available for download by registered Odyssey users, and Mid-Comp pledges to keep them up to date and backward-compatible as new versions of Odyssey are released. "The policies will be consistently upgradeable from version to version," Matzen said. "That's one guarantee that we give."

The core Odyssey product is composed of more than 20 different modules, such as general ledger, AR/AP, distribution, service, CRM, inventory management. With more than 7,500 Java classes, Mid-Comp says, Odyssey is one of the largest Java applications in existence. Consultants who implement Odyssey should be well versed in Java, WebSphere, DB2/400, and OS/400. Mid-Comp will be training and certifying its first batch of resellers next month at its headquarters in Melbourne; another class is scheduled for April.

Dennis Bress, the principal of Oz Global Software and a director at Mid-Comp, says it can be difficult to convince potential customers of what they're getting with Odyssey. "The first reaction is that it's too good to be true," he said. " 'You're trying to say I get most of the functionality of J.D. Edwards for a lifetime for one hundred grand, regardless of the number of users? Give me a break.' " But eventually, once they see what Odyssey can do, they'll come around, he said.

Mid-Comp International and Oz Global Software are looking for business partners around the globe that will localize Odyssey for specific geographical regions. For more information, contact the companies at www.midcomp.com.au and www.ozglobalsoftware.com.

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