Erik Damgaard ready with the successor to Concorde C5
Does the name “Erik Damgaard” ring a bell?
If you are in the ERP business then I am sure it will. Erik Damgaard was the architect behind Axapta, which today is better known as Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Erik Damgaard launched his first business management software package under the name Danmax to CP/M micro-computers at the Office & Data Exhibition in Copenhagen in October 1984. Erik is now ready with a new financial management system for small businesses. Uniconta, which is the name of the new product (or platform), will be presented at seminars in Jutland and on Zealand, Denmark, in early May 2016.
Concorde products
In 1986, Danmax was “replaced” by Concorde Economy, which in a short time became a huge hit among small Danish companies; for these companies an investment in a couple of PCs with the operating system MS-DOS, the network operating system Novell and the software package from Damgaard Data was the first step into the computer age. Part of the success behind Concorde Economy was not least the several hundred dealers that within a few years brought the products to all corners of the Danish market. When Erik Damgaard saw how these dealers were quick to exploit new options for customising the product to customers’ needs, the idea was born for what in 1991 became Concorde XAL and which in 1998 led to the flagship Concorde Axapta, currently marketed as Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Concorde XAL became, despite some teething problems, a huge success. XAL was ported to many platforms and was soon available on MS-DOS, OS/2, and the many flavours of UNIX. However, by 1992, Erik Damgaard realised that XAL had moved him up market and he was neglecting his original focus on the huge market of businesses with fewer than 10 IT users. He began building a new product, which in November 1994 was launched as Concorde C5 and was based on the same basic core as the much larger Concorde XAL system. Concorde C5 won new market share for Damgaard Data, the company Erik ran with his brother Preben, and even today thousands of small Danish companies continue to manage their business with C5.
Everything is different – almost
“Virtually everything has changed at the technological level since 1984, 1986, 1991, 1994 and 1998 which are the years when we released new products in Damgaard Data days,” says Erik Damgaard. “However, the customer’s challenges and needs are the basically the same, and they are not well served by the primarily cloud-based ERP systems offered on the market today.”
“Uniconta is designed for small businesses with fewer than 10 IT users and for the outsourced business management service providers that more and more companies today make use of. For the small businesses and their service providers the simple browser-based systems are simply too slow and too rigid,” explains Erik Damgaard. “We have developed a solution where the data resides in the cloud, but where the program logic is executed in an app on the users’ PC, Mac, tablet or smartphone. This allows the user to execute transactions much faster and productivity remains a top priority for many companies. My app also uses the PC’s memory and shortcut keys, and the user can change the location of data fields, add her own fields, customize reports and upload scanned documents in the background – all things that make Uniconta far more productive than the competition.”
Value Added Resellers are back in the game
Erik Damgaard has again chosen to put distribution in the hands of value added resellers and the seminars in May are also primarily directed at this audience.
Per Pedersen
“There is still a need for resellers developing industry specific functionality and additional modules for the customers,” says Per Pedersen, who takes care of the distribution of Uniconta. “The technology for these types of customisations and extensions is of course entirely different today than when C5 technology was launched, but the customer experience is the same. The customer receives a customised standard solution from a reseller who understands his business and is prepared to provide support when you need it.”
Uniconta is developed by Erik Damgaard as the chief architect with a team of programmers in India and Ukraine as well as a couple of old colleagues from the Damgaard Data C5-team.
