UMaine Business School Receives Software Donation
Contact: George Manlove at 581-3756
ORONO — A Portland software development firm has outfitted the University of Maine Business School’s computer lab with a new financial modeling program designed to give UMaine students a leg up on business planning.
The donation from the Quantrix company of its Quantrix Modeler software and about 40 licenses for the lab’s computers is valued at nearly $10,000 and will help students more easily understand and build business planning models, the company says. It also will allow UMaine business students to become familiar with software that many may find already in the workplace after they graduate, Quantrix says.
Company representatives have demonstrated the new program to business school faculty and some UMaine administrators, and UMaine Professor of Finance Bob Strong likes what he’s seen so far.
“I’m certainly going to use it in my investments class,” Strong says. “It’s conceivable that one of the accounting classes may find a use for it and for people in management information systems, I think they’ll find it quite interesting, too.”
Quantrix Modeler, Strong says, is similar to but more dynamic than traditional spreadsheet modeling software in that is more flexible and business projection data can be “sliced and diced” to be reconfigured by dragging and dropping information without having to rebuild the spreadsheet to accommodate changes in business scenarios. It is as easy or easier to use than a commonly used business spreadsheet program, Microsoft Excel, Strong and company representatives say.
“It will be a handy way for them to manipulate data quickly,” Strong says. “It’s clever.”
Company COO Chris Houle compares Quantrix Modeler and Excel this way: “Quark Express is to Microsoft Word as Quantrix is to Excel.”
The software is an intuitive program that makes business modeling, or projecting such things as sales growth and income over time, more flexible, particularly during presentations in which a presenter may be asked to shift values in charts, bars and graphs to reflect a different business perspective or condition, Houle says.
Quantrix Modeler incorporates a unique approach that separates the logic of a model from the structure, which allows users to create and use formulas outside the confines of the cell, says Peter Murray, president of Quantrix.
Users can make view multiple scenarios without intensive reprogramming, he says.
Knowledge of the Quantrix Modeler, which Houle predicts will become a common business software tool, can be “a differentiator” for students graduating from college and competing for a position in the business world.
“Gifts such as these are essential to keeping the University of Maine cutting edge,” says Jeffery Mills, UMaine’s vice president for university advancement, “as well as a real compliment to faculty member Bob Strong. He is seen as a leader in financial management in New England and it is outstanding that Quantrix wishes to support his academic work.”