In the enterprise applications arena, the small and mid-sized manufacturing market is a hotbed of activity, and this week’s earnings reports from a pair of ERP providers showed that IT spending among such companies is indeed on the rebound.
ERP provider Epicor Software this week reported total revenue of $109.2 million for the second quarter ended June 30, a 9% improvement over $100.4 million in the prior-year quarter. The bottom line showed improvement as well, though Epicor remained in the red, reporting a net loss of $1 million, compared with a loss of $6.7 million a year earlier.
License revenue for the mid-market ERP provider reached $19.2 million, up more than 9% year over year. Maintenance sales barely budged, inching up less than 1% to $47.5 million. Consulting revenue, meanwhile, jumped 7% to $34.3 million. Epicor also more than doubled its hardware sales to $8.2 million, a business line that covers point-of-sale technology for retailers.
The overall sales increase was driven by the company’s success in selling to new customers outside its existing software base. In a typical quarter, sales are split 50/50 between the installed base and new customers, officials said, but in Q2 the ratio was closer to 60/40 in favor of new arrivals. CEO George Klaus attributed much of the surge to the company’s Epicor 9 product, an ERP suite that has been on the market for more than a year but is still in the early part of its sales cycle, officials said.