Rent-An-App Player Biztone.Com Clinches $5.5m Venture Cap

By Lesley Moore, Newsbytes.
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA,

12 Nov 1999, 5:37 AM CST

Rent-An-App Player Biztone.Com Clinches $5.5m Venture Cap 11/12/99 KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA, 1999 NOV 12 (NB) -- By Lesley Moore, Newsbytes. Rent-an-app pioneer BizTone.com Inc has closed a $5.5 million investment round led by the Asia Java Fund, global investment firm ING-Barings and several angel investors.

The venture capital injection was a resounding endorsement for the Java-based developer which has its origins in Malaysia and is pushing the concept of delivering Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software as a service over the Internet.

"The advantage of BizTone is that it's just like electricity or water, available to your business all the time and you simply pay for what you use on a transaction basis, while someone else makes sure you get the service around the clock," said Darryl Carlton, BizTone's chief executive officer.

He said businesses wanting end-to-end accounting solutions stand to save millions of dollars in up-front capital and recurring costs for upgrades and training.

In July, BizTone began giving away for free its first product BizTone Financials v1.1 from its Website, at http://www.biztone.net , for one year if customers sign up for three years.

BizTone Financials is completely written in Java and offers general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, procurement, and sales tracking. It is available in English and both traditional and simplified Chinese.

The company signed on Singapore ONE, the island-wide broadband network, as an early distribution client.

BizTone cited projections from Forrester Research that the market for Internet-delivered business software will hit $6 billion worldwide by 2002, from almost zero today.

The Asia Java Fund named two other first recipients last week of the fund - QuotePower, a Hong Kong-based provider of online trading and financial information solutions; and Renren.com, a Hong Kong community site, that uses Java to drive its Websites and chat rooms.

The $48 million fund is a replica of a similar fund in the US and was set up by Sun Microsystems Inc. [NASDAQ:SUNW] to assist start-ups and technology companies build markets for information appliances, consumer-oriented content-based applications and business-to-business e-commerce.

It has attracted several high-profile investors, including Pacific Century CyberWorks, Cable & Wireless HKT, Sun Hung Kai Properties, Fujitsu, NTT DoCoMo, Mitsui & Co, Nomura/Jafco, Singapore Telecom, the National Computer Board of Singapore and the Technopreneurship Investment Fund of Singapore.

Reported By Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com

05:37 CST

(19991112/WIRES ASIA, ONLINE, BUSINESS/)

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