JDA Closes Out 2005, Looks for Growth in 2006

Retail application software specialist JDA Software has announced its financial results for the fourth quarter, and its results are stabilizing. Overall sales were $55.1 million, down 4 percent, and the software license sales component of this number came to $15.6 million, down 23 percent.

JDA said it closed 100 deals in the quarter, and that another four customers had signed up for its .NET-enabled, Windows-based Portfolio retail suite, bringing the total customer count to 14. A few weeks ago, JDA had warned Wall Street that a few big deals had slipped into the new year, and that pushed the company to report a loss of $204,000, or one penny per share. JDA’s chief executive officer, Hamish Brewer, is still pretty optimistic about 2006, and thinks the company can bolster its earnings. JDA exited the year with $111.5 million in cash, up from $97.1 million a year ago, so things are not all bad. It is just that the retail market has relatively few players with lots of ISVs chasing them and this is one of the most difficult industries in which to sell software suites.

In a separate announcement, JDA said that it had amicably settled a lawsuit with Belk, a privately held operator of department store chains on the American east coast. Belk, which has been a JDA customer since 2003, sued JDA in September 2005 for $2.8 million in damages because it claimed JDA didn’t deliver enhancements to its retail software earlier that year, causing it to lose sales. Belk has signed an extended agreement with JDA for a wide variety of software from the Portfolio suite of software. The financial terms of the settlement were not divulged.