A Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein spinoff said a clutch of financial companies are testing a remote-access system it developed with Microsoft Corp. for the investment bank’s mobile work force.
Aspelle Ltd. says its system was “built from the ground up” for Windows 2000 and Microsoft’s .NET platform; provides high security and access to desktop and corporate server applications and data; and need not be installed on individual computers. It was developed in London and at Microsoft facilities in Redmond, Wash.
The financial firms testing Aspelle Everywhere include the investment bank and its German parent, Dresdner Bank; two Wall Street firms, and two investment banks in London, said Simon Johnson, Aspelle’s vice president of technology, in an interview last month. Seventy-five percent of the users are financial companies, he said. Aspelle declined to give a total.
The company announced July 22 that the agricultural conglomerate Cargill Inc. will also use its system. But Bethany Chadwick, Aspelle’s senior vice president of marketing, said the primary target market is the financial services industry.
Large and midsize companies in these industries need mobile access to critical applications and data at corporate computers, Ms. Chadwick said. That is what Aspelle’s software is designed to provide. It “delivers all the internal resources that an employee uses on a day-to-day basis — the corporate Intranet, all the applications and data — with just a Web browser,” she said.
Mr. Johnson said other financial companies were also expressing interest in using the product. Ms. Chadwick said: “Financial companies have … a ‘keep up with Joneses’ mentality. If someone knows that another company has something, they say, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got catch to up with them.’ “
Sally Hudson, an analyst at the IDC research firm in Framingham, Mass., said Aspelle’s product may have particular appeal to companies, especially those in the financial services industry, that do not want to “rewrite their legacy systems.” With the downturn in the economy, few companies want to make huge investments in creating new programs, she said.
“There are several products out there that do Web-to-host or vice versa, but the key differentiator here is the security is built from inception within a Microsoft .Net architecture,” Ms. Hudson said. Companies with similar products often add the security layer later, she said.
Aspelle is based in London and also has offices in New York and Seattle. It has 40 employees. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, which still funds it, started developing the system for its own employees in June 1999 and later made it a technology incubator project. It spun off the unit in December.
Ms. Chadwick said it charges a one-time $250 per “seat” or, for companies where few employees would use the system at the same time, $500 per concurrent user. There is also a 25% maintenance fee for the duration of a license.
