By David DormanAmerican Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for January 2000
The beginning of the new year/century/millennium sets the stage for shifting fortunes in the library automation marketplace. The most dramatic current news is that Ameritech Library Services has been sold to a pair of allied investor groups, the 21st Century Group out of Dallas and the Green Leaf Ridge Company based in Chicago (AL, Dec. 1999, p. 20–21). Neither group has any experience with library-related companies.
ALS is the largest vendor in the ILS marketplace, but has lost market share in North America in the last two years due to intense competition by companies offering newer technology at prices that continue to fall. John Ware, the former city manager of Dallas and president of the 21st Century Group, appears to have a definite plan in mind for stemming ALS’s decline in market share: “We believe we will be able to grow the business both internally and through add-on acquisitions.” The company will work, he goes on to say, “to develop a new brand and identity for the company. We expect that this effort, combined with several other important initiatives, will be a catalyst for significant growth in the future.”
Will ALS management depart after a decent interval or stay on? Will the new investors hang on to the company or turn around and sell it to another library automation vendor? If they keep it, how much support or independence will they give it? And will ALS, amidst all this uncertainty, be able to focus on developing its Horizon product—which clearly represents its future—to meet the demanding standards of the marketplace? Its customers and potential clients will be watching developments closely.
ALS is not the only big question mark in the library automation marketplace as we enter the new millennium. As of late November, DRA had still not put its Taos system into general release. New system sales have declined significantly for DRA this past year because the company promoted its new software long before it was ready to deliver it to customers, thereby raising expectations it has not yet been able to fulfill. In the meantime, Innovative Interfaces, Sirsi, and Endeavor have been selling well in all of DRA’s traditional public and academic markets.
VTLS, after having gone through a similar difficult period when its new Virtua system experienced delays in coming to market, has now begun to pick up its sales, albeit slowly. Geac’s share of the ILS market, on the other hand, seems to be in a slow decline as its sales lag and its user base bleeds away. The company’s recent $90-million purchase of British-based JBA—which sells payroll, inventory control, and manufacturing software to corporations—takes it even further afield from its library roots. Geac now has an annual revenue of about $1 billion and is the fourth-largest business applications software company in the world.
Several new ILS contenders are making a sizable splash. In the small-to-medium market, The Library Corporation’s newly developed Library.Solution now has over 250 installations. TLC is competing successfully with both the (former) microcomputer vendors for the small public and K–12 market, as well as with the (former) minicomputer vendors for medium-sized public and academic libraries. The company’s innovative pricing policies are also helping to drive prices down. Sirsi followed TLC’s pricing lead by recently announcing a new ILS package targeted at small libraries. Called QuickStart, it includes a free server and is priced considerably lower—and is easier to install—than Sirsi’s standard Unicorn offering.
The other new contender is the Aleph 500 system. After several years of fruitless efforts to successfully break into the North American academic and research library market, ExLibris has become a head-to-head contender with Endeavor in that market. The 1999 sales of its Aleph 500 system to McGill University, the University of Iowa, Boston College, and the 64-campus system of the State University of New York, coupled with the establishment of ExLibris USA in Chicago, have enabled ExLibris to gain enough of a presence in North America to persuade a growing number of medium and large academic and research libraries to give it serious consideration in their selection process.
2000 is already shaping up to be an interesting year in the library automation marketplace.