Austrian Software Maker Sells Off i5/OS HR Applications

Published: March 3, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

An Austrian software development firm that dates back to 1968 and that was one of the innovators in the human resources application software market, Personal and Informatik, last week said that it has divested itself of its OS/400 and i5/OS human resources application, LOGA/400. Viennese IT services company Infoniqa Group will be taking over support for the product.

The mainframe and midrange application ecosystems used to be quite diverse and are quite old, and many of us outside of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany have probably never heard of P&I AG or its LOGA/400 HR applications. P&I has a complex history, but the company was founded in 1968 by Egbert Becker and LOGA was brought to market in 1970 for mainframes. In the mid-1990s, the company revamped its product for the client/server approach and in 1999, the company went public on the Neuer Markt technology listing of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In 2000, P&I broke itself into two bits, P&I Application Services, based in Wiesbaden, Austria, for outsourcing the LOGA HR products, and P&I Midrange based in Boglingen, Germany, which took a payroll package called Lohn/400 that it acquired in 2000 and redeveloped it to create a new product for the iSeries called LOGA/400. The P&I services business currently has around 3,000 customers, while the P&I midrange software business has around 600 customers. P&I says that it wants to focus on its Web-based HR solutions and has therefore found a home for the LOGA/400 software. P&I was acquired by private equity firm the Carlyle Group in 2004, and acquired another company called--brace yourself--Zeitmanagementsysteme Hard-und Software GmbH, to build out its current Web-based HR software product line. (The LOGA/400 software may or may not have attained all of the benefits of the Web infrastructure changes.)

As it turns out, Infoniqa Group is not new to the System i market. For many years, one of its subsidiaries named LGVsoft has provided services and support for LOGA Vplus, a version of the LOGA/400 platform. The new home of LOGA/400 is promising to keep the software support in line with that provided by its former owner, and to make enhancements, too.

"As iSeries specialists and as a long-standing partner of P&I AG, providing support for payroll accounting software, we see not only the challenge of continuing to provide excellent service for LOGA/400 customers and partners," explained Siegfried Milly, managing director of Infoniqa Holding, the parent company behind the IT services firm. "Above and beyond that, we intend to sustain our new customers' enthusiasm for LOGA/400 through new modules and expanded functionality." (I think something got a little lost in the translation there concerning the "challenge of continuing to provide excellent service," but you get the idea.)

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