European push

The launch of ALFA version 5 (v5) last month
follows two years of development and a £5 million (€5.5 million)
investment. The outcome is what Andrew Denton, the company’s sales
and marketing director, summarised as being a “very new and yet not
very new product at the same time”.

ALFA’s previous version 4, in fact, has all
the same functionality of v5, but this one is developed on a
brand-new technology stack and has a web presentation on it, which
Denton said further improves the software.

“We were very conscious that it was time to do
a technology refresh of the product. What our team did was to come
up with a way of migrating, not re-writing, the old code onto a new
technology platform,” he said.

But the company is keen to highlight that v5
is not a new functional set, largely because the previous version
was already a “mature” product, and also as ALFA has been around in
the market for almost two decades. Current CHP customers with
previous versions of ALFA will just need to do an upgrade for the
new version.

“Starting from scratch with a new product
would have meant having no clear upgrade path for our existing
customers, confusing new customers and throwing away our heritage,”
Denton said.

Denton said the key highlights of v5 are its
new technology stack, the end-to-end presentation layer, the
enhanced functionality with respect to its multilingual and
multi-GAAP capabilities, its transportability and what he calls a
“really sexy” interface.

More than anything else, however, according to
Denton there is a “long-term” benefit to v5, which he summed up as
the opportunity to do “stuff that could actually revolutionise the
industry” with it.

One such thing, he said, are “intelligent” or
“self-defining” scorecards. These, which CHP is also about to
release, allow data mining using association pairs in a way that
allows scorecards to “modify themselves”.

In practice, according to Denton, they would
work as it already happens in other fields where data mining
techniques are in use.

For instance, by extracting data relating to
buyers’ habits, a US supermarket chain found that in a certain time
frame, when nappies were bought, so was beer, because fathers
leaving their offices would stop by and buy both.

The data mining picked this up, and the
supermarket decided to put beer next to nappies, which resulted in
sales of both products going up in that time frame.

CHP says now that something like that would
become possible also with scorecards, and it hopes that most
lessors, that already use them at the point of sale, will see the
advantages of having scorecards that allow them to have constant –
even daily or hourly – predictions and that could modify
themselves, instead of scorecards that only are updated
periodically.

He said that many existing and potential
customers have reacted positively to v5. The new version is already
being implemented for one customer, and three others have just
committed to it.

But ALFA v5 is not the only news for CHP at
present. Its new strategy includes a “global push”, with a
particular focus on Europe. Indeed, while until now the company’s
major deals have been mostly in the UK, American and Australian
leasing markets, the company intends to focus more also elsewhere,
particularly on its “doorstep” in Europe.

CHP Consulting’s strategy towards Europe had
long been quite conservative, as the company had preferred to focus
on the Australian and US markets because, despite their distance,
they are Anglophile and have regulations and a market that is not
too distant from the UK ones.

But in a move to market its products and
particularly v5 also across Europe, in early 2010 CHP will open
three new offices in Frankfurt, Paris and Stockholm to serve some
of Europe’s major markets, as well as providing a mechanism support
for a number of customers it recently won in the Nordics.

New markets like Spain and Italy on the one
hand, and the CEE region on the other could follow suit.

CHP: Claims to have ‘never been
busier’

Despite the financial crisis,
London-headquartered software house CHP Consulting has had a busy
time recently.

Apart from spending a large amount of energy
in developing the new version of its software ALFA, it also signed
a significant number of deals with leasing companies.

Andrew Denton, the company’s sales and
marketing director, said that the company has “never been busier”
and attributes its success to “a combination of luck and being good
at what we do”.

The company was founded in 1990, and has
delivered asset finance solutions for almost 20 years. It currently
employs a team of over 150 permanent staff across offices in
London, US and Australia.

According to Denton, who joined the company in
1995, the big change for CHP happened around 2000.

“We didn’t really start to realise what we
were capable of until 2000. Then in 2000, things started to
accelerate [ALFA was implemented at UK’s largest lessor Lombard],
and we have been on this path ever since.”

The company’s staff has an average age of
under 30, but according to Denton the majority of its employees
“have already spent 10 years in the industry, working at different
places and having different experiences”.

He added: “These guys really know their
stuff.”

Following the release of ALFA v5, the company
plans to make a number of promotions in its computer science team,
for being able to combine the ALFA platform with all the
functionality on the most up-to-date technology set
available.