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The company is an employer of around 300 worldwide, including 180 in its Dublin offices and while management was unable to comment on the issue, it's thought that the company will trim around 10 percent of its workforce, or 30 jobs.
In November Eontec secured USD25 million in equity investment in a round of funding led by Warburg Pincus and which also included existing Eontec shareholders such as ICC Venture Capital. ICC was the main contributor to the firm's fundraising round in 2000, when the software company raised USD10.4 million in venture capital.
Following the new funding in late 2001, Eontec said it had ambitions to increase its employment levels by around 50 for its research & development, sales and marketing and professional services units. Those plans are now thought to have been put on hold.
In the past nine months the company has seen substantial growth, when in May it expanded its US presence by opening offices in Charlotte, North Carolina and Toronto, Canada. These were in addition to the company's existing offices in the UK, Germany and India. Earlier this month Eontec also announced that it would be opening an office in Japan. Over the past 18 months, the company has more than doubled employment levels from 134 in mid 2000 to 300 by January 2002.
The company's recent difficulties are not however thought to be indicative of the market for Eontec products as a whole. Last month research company Forrester said that on-line banking in Europe is attracting more than one million new users a month and is expected to grow to more than 110 million users by 2005. More than one-third of European Internet users, or about 42 million people, bank on-line at the moment.
The research firm said that many established banks would, over the next few years, try to move their customers onto on-line services in an effort to cut the cost of transactions. Eontec's offering is designed to allow banks to reduce the bank's overall spend on multi-channel remote banking technologies.
BankFrame is Eontec's main product. It is a set of reusable EJB (enterprise JavaBean) component-based banking processes and solution sets that can be used across various channels, including wireless, the Internet, call centres and traditional branches. Essentially it gives the banks that use the technology a consolidated view of any customer across all channels, and facilitates the faster development and deployment of new products and channels.
Fundamentally, EJB systems let developers focus on the actual business architecture of a model, rather than concern themselves with large amounts of programming and coding needed to connect all the working parts of a software system. This is left to the EJB vendors like Eontec. The EJB technology itself has become increasingly popular in recent years among banks and other business because it cuts costs for the users but also makes upgrading and adding new systems remarkably easy for banks and other companies.
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