Prophet 21 Ports Wholesale Package to AS/400
Prophet 21 Inc. (Yardley, Pa.) has announced plans to port its Prophet 21 Wholesale solution, previously known as Servent, to the AS/400 this summer.
Prophet 21 Wholesale, now available on Unix and Windows NT, offers function for order and inventory management, purchasing, financials, and shipping and receiving. The company has developed wholesale distribution software for the past 30 years.
The AS/400 version will be a complete 64-bit version of the software, intended for small- and medium-sized businesses and departments of larger enterprises. It will run natively on the DB2 UDB for AS/400 database and incorporate AS/400 administration functions.
Scott Deutsch, VP of marketing at Prophet 21, says his company evaluated the AS/400 market and saw a lot of opportunity there for its solutions. “They have probably the most loyal following of any platform,” Deutsch says. “So we asked ourselves, ‘How do we reach those customers?’ A significant majority of them would not move to the Unix platform and a very small percentage would move to NT. So we saw a tremendous opportunity to reach a lot of customers, which we were unable to reach. It had nothing to do with our functionality and everything to do with our platform.”
Deutsch says 20-22 percent of Prophet 21’s potential market is on the AS/400, particularly middle-market customers. He describes Prophet 21’s “sweet spot” of the market as customers between $20 million and $100 million in annual revenues.
--D. Callaghan