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Juneau, Alaska -- The announcement hit just as the Treasury Division of Alaska's Department of Revenue began implementing Platinum Software's General Ledger module. When Platinum gave notice in October, 1995 that it would no longer support its product on Sybase after 1997, the Treasury Division halted its implementation plans.
Carolyn Hartsog, the division's assistant comptroller, explained the next move: "Rather than operate a GL with no vendor support, we opted to search for a new package that ran on Sybase."
After a lengthy evaluation, the Treasury Division signed an agreement in June, 1996 to replace their Platinum package with the general ledger module from Skylight Systems, Inc.-- RFS G/L. The software will run on a Windows NT client and a Solaris/UltraSPARC 170 server.
The Treasury Division manages the investment portfolios for 18 separate State of Alaska funds totaling approximately $12 billion in investments. Purchasing RFS G/L allows the division to protect its own investment in hardware and database software. The module will be used to maintain accounting information for several governmental funds and trust funds, as well as accounting for four investment pools in which the funds participate.
"Eventually, the module will be integrated with our existing investment inventory system -- PORTIA from Thomson Investment Software -- which keeps track of the purchases, sales, amortizations and accrued income for all individual securities owned by the funds," Hartsog said.
"RFS offered all the features we felt we needed at an affordable price," Hartsog said. "It ran on the Sybase platform and came highly recommended by several RFS users."
Overall, Hartsog cited three areas in which she expects Skylight and RFS G/L to contribute most: flexibility, responsive vendor support, and solid reporting capabilities. Installation and training will occur during the first week of June.
Michael Rappaport, managing director of Skylight Systems, said "our commitment to Sybase dates back to our inception, so we're looking forward to offering this expertise to the Treasury Division's users and IS staff."
Available since 1991, RFS is running in Fortune 500 companies and also in mid-sized distribution operations. Written in Passport, a SQL-based 4GL application development environment, RFS offers complete flexibility for organizations that want to incorporate their unique business practices into the RFS system. RFS is available on major relational databases and virtually any open hardware platform.
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