SRC Adds Web Services To I*Net Budgeting App

With the recession-induced need for efficiency and growing interest in corporate-performance management practices, financial planning and budgeting applications are in demand. SRC Software Inc. is shipping a new release of its Web-based I*Net Budgeting application built on the .Net architecture with Web-services support.

Competing vendors such as Cognos (which recently acquired financial-planning application vendor Adaytum), Comshare, and Hyperion all see financial planning and budgeting as a key component of their corporate-performance management strategies.

I*Net Budgeting 9.2 lets users of SRC's Advisor Series of budgeting and financial-planning applications work on budgets and forecasts via the Web. The new release supports deployments of thousands of users because of the scalability provided by .Net and the application's support for HTTP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, and Direct Internet Message Encapsulation communication protocols.

"This is a definite requirement for most companies," says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty, referring to the application's new Web capabilities, which facilitate large-scale deployments. SRC has also done a better job melding financial planning with analysis and reporting software tools than some competitors that package them separately, Hagerty says. Corporate-performance management requires that financial planning and reporting be combined, not operate as discrete activities, he says.

I*Net Budgeting 9.2 also offers new process control and versioning capabilities and improvements to the user interface. The software is priced at $14,995 and requires SRC's Budget Advisor or Payroll Planner to implement.