Published on 09 October 2009

It boasts a fully glazed double-skinned façade which is cooled by extracted air from the offices, thus reducing the overall heat load. Amongst its other superlatives, at 180m, the building is over three times the height of Niagara Falls.

It is appropriate, therefore, that the high-tech Gherkin was the venue on 29 October for the official launch of CHP Consulting’s ALFA v5 software. Like the building, ALFA v5 is unique, the culmination of over a year’s work by CHP staff and a corporate investment of some £5m. Moreover, the software is the result of extensive market research by the company.

Andy Denton CHP’s sales and marketing director explained that last year (2008) the decision was made to change ALFA’s technical platform to make use of new technologies. The aim was to deliver more, to fit better in an enterprise architecture and to create a class-leading platform for geographical expansion.

“We also,” he stressed, “wanted to be able to deliver all of ALFA in a browser – it’s the most familiar interface, it’s cheaper to deploy and it allows us to build in usability enhancements to help customers do their job. We challenged ourselves to do this technology refresh and yet maintain 100% of the functional heritage built into ALFA over the last 20 years.”

ALFA v5 is end-to-end Java, runs on any architecture and is 100% browser. “And yet,” Denton added, “for our existing customers, it is just an upgrade from version 4. They will see the difference but everything they had in version 4 will be there.”

Denton stressed that ALFA v5 is a conversion of its predecessor – not a re-write. He said: “We have moved what we know works, what we know performs, onto a new technical platform.”

In addition CHP’s refreshed technology has: end-to-end support for all aspects of the asset finance industry, the “first and still the best” workflow automation in the business; product templates that underpin the product and service-development flexibility for customers and “the only integrated business rules engine in our market”.

Denton stressed that the launch of ALFA v5 comes at a time of unprecedented global expansion for CHP. The facts bear this out. With offices in N.America and Australia, and implementations on a worldwide arena - on the evening CHP Consulting’s technological primacy far outmatched its host building.

The above was published online by Asset Finance Europe on 4 October 2009.
Reproduced by permission of the publisher.