A Part-Time Business to Pay for College Tuition Developed into One of Philadelphia’s Fastest-Growing Companies

Newtown Square, PA  July 3, 2001.  Today the 70 employees of Applied Business Technologies, Inc. — headquartered here in the National Business Center complex on West Chester Pike — will celebrate the Company’s Silver Anniversary.  The part-time programming services business ABT founder and current President David K. Moldoff began in his sophomore year at Drexel University has grown slowly but steadily over the last 25 years to become one of the Greater Philadelphia region’s fastest-growing companies.

ABT counts some 70 educational institutions as users of its software and services in their admissions, student records, accounting or alumni-relations offices.  This list of ABT clients includes local schools like Moore College of Art and Design, as well as Babson College; Choate Rosemary Hall; the University of California, Irvine Extension; EARTH University in Costa Rica; and Capella University – the latter being one of the leading accredited, Internet-based institutions of higher education.
Windows and Web Software for Education’s Customers

In 1980, the company began investing profits from its consulting and programming practice to develop software products for college administration.  It took three years to launch ABT CAMPUS®, a fully integrated system for small colleges.  In 1984, ABT migrated their applications to Novell and offered the first networking solution for small colleges in the country.

In 1990, ABT began developing a strategy to replace the MS DOS-based ABT CAMPUS® product.  In 1994 ABT completed the first phase of this plan, releasing ABT CAMPUS® for Windows 3.1 with Microsoft SQL Server 4.2.  In 1996 the Company, having completed the re-architecting of the system with the assistance of Tompkins Cortland Community College (NY), Babson College (MA), and Randolph Macon Women’s College (VA), launched Release 1.00 of PowerCAMPUS® .

ABT established its strategic partnership with Great Plains Software in 1997. A best-in-class provider of general ledger, accounting, HR, and payroll applications, Great Plains is used today by over 200 colleges and universities (Great Plains was acquired by Microsoft in December, 2000). Using custom interfaces developed by ABT, clients are able to maintain subsidiary journals for student accounting in PowerCAMPUS, while posting information into the Great Plains finance system.  The benefits to joint ABT/Great Plains clients include more accurate, up-to-date financial information for managing operations and supporting decisions.

In 1997 ABT also became one of the first vendors serving the education market to offer a Web-enabled student- and administrative-system with the release of two Microsoft Internet Information Server products, IQ.Student and IQ.Faculty.  The new Web functionality has enabled administrative staff to significantly increase productivity and improve the levels of service they can provide to their customers: the students, faculty, and administrators of their institutions.  IQ.Student empowers students to take care of business on-line, without standing in-line.

The wisdom of writing the PowerCAMPUS application to take full advantage of Microsoft’s mature Windows NT/95 operating systems, MS Office applications, and SQL Server relational database products is evident from the rapid growth in ABT revenues.  Market acceptance of ABT’s integrated, Web-enabled PowerCAMPUS administrative- and student-information systems enabled the Company to achieve 158% revenue growth over the past five years, placing ABT 41st among the 2000 Deloitte & Touche Fast 50 in the region.
ABT’s Next 25 Years

ABT President David Moldoff understands that, in order to sustain the Company’s current rate of growth, additional investment in people and systems is necessary.  “We’ve written a 5-year strategic plan with dual objectives of attracting investors and prioritizing our research and development projects to better manage the resources we have.  The recent ‘dot bombs’ have made venture capitalists wary of technology companies, but we’ve got a 25-year track record and the goodwill of our customers working in our favor—not to mention a working prototype of a new mobile-computing application.”

In fact the Company chalked up two “education-market firsts” last year: the first contract for PowerCAMPUS ASP, a remote-hosted, Internet-based system that allows institutions with limited resources to “rent” its software products, as well as the launch of a joint application development program with five colleges to build and test ABT PocketCAMPUS, the aforementioned mobile computing application.  For more information, refer to ABT’s Web sites:  www.abtcampus.com and www.pocketcampus.com.