Coda recently unveiled Project Neon, which has cost them around £6m and nearly 100 man-years to develop. It’s identified as a suite of accounting, procurement, invoice matching, asset management and workflow management applications. Its web browser architected and web services enabled. Few claims that is worth discussing:
- Integrate with any ERP or finance system – easier claim if every other system in the world is web services enabled; of course this is not the case.
- Features unique collaboration technology – does this means web 2.0 technologies? Nope. Simply a provision of an on-line portal.
- High volume invoice matching system that will work with any ERP or finance system – is this internally and externally? Internally is my guess!
In addition, Jeremy Roche, CODA’s CEO has commented
“Neon gives clients: the most technologically and functionally advanced financial accounting system in the world today; a state-of-the-art spend management system that will bring control and efficiency to the procurement process; and a range of other transactional systems including world-class, high-volume invoice matching and asset systems. This further establishes CODA’s leadership in finance systems for mid-market and enterprise-level organizations, and makes us a serious contender in the global procurement systems market.”
I am always suspicious when companies claim to be the best. Such claims are acceptable if evidence can be provided to substantiate the claim.
It seems that with project Neon, Coda see themselves as a serious contender in "spend management" and "procure-to-pay" market. So Coda is no longer just in the accounts and finance software market! Now they are competing with Oracle, SAP as well as perhaps Ariba and others!
The key reason I was attracted to this news release is that Coda saw ebdex as a competitor, in reality we were a complementor rather than a competitor. So, I was interested to find out whether they have developed a "document exchange" hub-and-spoke solution. It does not seem to be the case. Instead they have added lot of more functionality, web services element and has improved the user interface.
Tags: Coda, Project Neon