Directors quit as rebranded Misys promotes original Brooms system
The software house formerly known as Misys, is pulling away from its latest back office system in favour of 25-year-old software, Insurance Times has learned.
It has also emerged that two directors, including sales director James Gamble, have quit the company following a disagreement over shares and strategy.
Misys, now rebranded as Open GI following an MBO by Montague Private Equity in March, is understood to be “actively encouraging” OASys (Windows) users to return to its older Brooms system.
An industry source told Insurance Times: “The OASys front office system will remain as a quotation product, but the OASys back office system will stop being sold to new customers and those that have it will, as and when time permits, be persuaded to move back to Brooms.
“My feeling is, they will not put money into the development of products, but cut costs and try therefore to make as much money as possible and increase revenue.”
In response, Open GI said that it had a “dual product strategy” which included both OASys and Brooms. It added it had £4m already earmarked for research and development.
Phillip Bell, chief executive of Open International, said: “Over the coming weeks we will be launching a host of new technology for brokers.”
Questions over the future of OASys follow the departure of two senior directors.
Sales director, James Gamble and Stephen James product management director, quit Open GI in April.
Sources suggested their departures were prompted by concerns about product strategy following the company's £182m MBO and dissatisfaction over share allocation.
Bell said: “Those individuals have made a considerable contribution to the business over many years. We would like to publicly thank them and wish them well for the future.”
On Misys' new brand name, Bell said: “We chose Open GI as it symbolises our open and straight forward approach to business and the relationships we have with our customers.”
He added: “One of our key strengths is that we deliver what we say we are going to deliver.”
