MS2 To Unveil Accelerate Upgrade, Secures FinancingMS2 To Unveil Accelerate Upgrade, Secures Financing

Product life cycle automation vendor MS2 Inc. will next week unveil an upgrade of its Accelerate software that will help high-tech vendors manage the complexities of planning and launching a product.

The company also expects to reveal next week that it's sealed a deal with a large semiconductor manufacturer for a 30,000-seat project. What's more, MS2 says it has secured $20 million in its fourth round of financing, led by Bowman Capital Management.

With $51.5 million in its coffers and 14 new customers last quarter, MS2 is predicting profitability by the first quarter next year. Accelerate will get the company there, the vendor says. "In [economic] times like this, people give up trying to create demand," says MS2 chairman and CEO Jeff Hudson. They're instead focusing on satisfying their user base by making sure their products debut as promised, on time, and at the highest quality. "When we come out of this, the companies with the great products are going to win."

The company says Accelerate 2001 helps companies reach that goal by "blowing up silos" that threaten the timely success of one or more product development projects by containing information that needs to be easily available to other members of a product development team, its leaders, or executives around the world. The latest version of Accelerate builds on the current software with features that make it easier for managers to see into the entire product life cycle. The current software offers a set of best practices and templates, a single repository of current product data, portfolio visibility into the status of ongoing projects, and role-driven Web publishing capabilities (which let product development team members build targeted Web sites for audiences such as the sales force).

Dashboard and Web page views, for instance, give managers and executives, respectively, extensive visibility into the project status, helping them see where obstacles lie and allocate resources to keep things running on track. Customizable My MS2 pages let users create alerts for upcoming deadlines and see team status reports. It's all Web-based, so team members can update project information from the road as well as the desktop. The software is based on XML, to speed integration with other apps where users may keep project data. "The issue is to get better products to market faster," says Hudson.

The company next week also plans to reveal a formal alliance with one of the Big 5 consulting firms to build a practice around the MS2 software. Competition today comes primarily from companies that roll their own life cycle automation software, as well as small startups such as XIS and IDE. But down the road MS2 says it wouldn't be surprised to see enterprise resource planning vendors looking more seriously at the market, which hovers at about $22 billion worldwide annually.