At the meeting of March 13th, the City Council unanimously agreed to partially restart the selection process for new financial software. While not all members agreed, the action was taken in order to address an alleged conflict in the selection process and a disagreement over the age of the software architecture.

The company recommended by the staff, Springbrook Software of Portland Oregon, was challenged by several members of the Council, including myself, due to the outdated eighties software platform and the lack of city clients in the State except for Fruita. Springbrook's software uses ".net" or what is commonly called client server based architecture.

This means a copy of the programs must be physically present on every desk top running the applications. They try to overcome this limitation by introducing "thin-clients" using terminal servers or Citrix servers. The city spent close to $250,000 trying to implement a thin-client solution previously but the strategy was abandoned in December of 2005.

The software company that was not carried through the entire process by the staff, Innoprise Software, Inc. of Broomfield's package runs on Java (J2EE), which is the latest and greatest thing in client server software. They also use My-SQL as their database engine. Both of these technologies are state of the art. My-SQL is open source and that could save the city a considerable amount of money.

Neighboring Cities using Innoprise software include: Broomfield, Louisville, Lone Tree, Greenwood Village, Loveland, Littleton, and Erie. Cities seriously considering some Innoprise software besides the Northglenn Council include Brighton, Lakewood, Englewood, Sheridan, Greeley and Cheyenne, WY.

The top three software companies were contacted to participate in additional demos this last week. Springbrook declined in as much as they have appeared before the Council on two occasions. Munis/Tyler declined. Innoprise accepted. Arrangements are being made for a demo at the present time. The software purchased will be expected to serve the City for ten years. With a total cost of over half of a million dollars, we need to get it right.

I would like to acknowledge the technical expertise of Tom Pond for information previously received that I have used in this article.