Atlantic looks to 'future of the industry'

The Cleckheaton-based company, which designs and sells business and resource management software applications, said the new software as a service (SAAS) platform will help it target small and medium-sized businesses, as well as individual departments within larger organisations.

The online OnDemand service operates solely via the internet.

"It's the future of the software industry," said Atlantic's chief executive Eugene Blaine. "A lot of people are outsourcing elements of IT by moving to the OnDemand model."

The new platform, which will be launched on October 29, is also more efficient for the group, reducing the sales cycle from up to six months down to a day.

"The key is to make the product very easy to use. We've spent the past few years working on that," said Mr Blaine.

He was speaking yesterday as the group announced a return to profit and said it was confident it can continue to grow.

But the group warned that trading remains challenging as customers' IT budgets remain under pressure.

In the six months to June 30, turnover increased to 728,000, up from 647,000 in the same period the year before.

The group reported pre-tax profits of 21,000, an improvement on the 148,000 loss the year before.

Over the half year the group won a number of new blue chip customers including online insurance group esure, credit check company Experian, Merseyside Police and the British Computer Society.

At the end of June, the group had cash balances of 2.11m. Cash balances have increased by 80,000 since the group's financial year end on December 31, 2009.

Atlantic said it has still managed to maintain its substantial cash reserves despite launching the Saas platform next month.

The directors are proposing an interim dividend of 0.1p a share, to be paid on November 5 to shareholders who wereon the register on October 8.

The shares closed last night unchanged at 13.5p.