The second business-to-business application on SingaporeONE has emerged with the launch of i-ERP yesterday.
Pivotpoint Software Inc., US-based service provider of customer-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, is offering i-ERP over the SingaporeONE broadband network to local small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
who wish to outsource their ERP implementations.
i-ERP is a service which consists of the full version of Pivotpoint’s Point.Man application including financials, customer sales, and
manufacturing systems. It is targeted at SMEs who want instant implementations but do not wish to buy and manage the full suite of ERP solutions.
Local SMEs with offices overseas can also make use of this service as iERP can be delivered to them over the narrowband Internet.
However, users who dial into SingaporeONE from outside the country would
experience much slower downloads compared to local users linked via ADSL
modems or ATM fiber-optic links. Thus overseas dialers do not get rich
multimedia experience with product information.
“The key companies to benefit from i-ERP are Singapore companies,” said
Woon Yew Thong, president of Pivotpoint Software Inc in Asia Pacific. “In
the next six months, we hope to grow the business in Singapore [first].”
He said he is targeting 200 companies by the end of the year after giving
an estimate of 60,000 to 80,000 SMEs in Singapore today. Woon added the company would evaluate the success in Singapore first before considering whether to build similar data centers in Australia, Hong
Kong, China, and Malaysia.
Pivotpoint’s i-ERP service will cost per user S$100 (US$59) per month. No
complex installations are involved as users just need to login into the
i-ERP system using a user name and a password for authentication.
The entire system is built on the SingaporeONE ATM infrastructure operated
by 1-Net Singapore Pte Ltd..
Today, there are 5,000 cable modem users and 13,000 ADSL modem users in
Singapore, the majority of whom are home users, said Mock Pak Lum, CEO of
1-Net Singapore. By the end of 1999, we hope to get 100,000 users in total
with the addition of business users, he said.
The i-ERP service announced yesterday came a month after the announcement
of a prototype, e-Link, the first business-to-business application on
SingaporeONE.
The e-Link service provides advertising agencies and media independents
with real-time management of advertisement bookings and inquiries on the
Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS).
