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Executive Corner

Greetings from Manhattan CEO, Craig Gillespie

I am pleased to be writing to you in our first Manhattan North America Newsletter! The editorial staff and I are looking forward to communicating with you on the most relevant events, industry news, customer and partner profiles, new software releases, integrations and applications, and best practices. We welcome any ideas you all have for subsequent issues of this quarterly publication—and you can tell us your thoughts and offer suggestions by answering our short Newsletter Survey.

What an incredible year Manhattan had in 2009! I must admit, I was worried that the economy was going to have a negative effect on Manhattan business, but the opposite happened. Manhattan welcomed numerous new clients into the North American family in 2009. In fact, all sectors around the globe showed significantly increased client activity.

And why did this happen you may wonder? At the beginning of the year, the main driver was portfolio reduction across the board, but by the fourth quarter we were seeing a shift to portfolio optimization. All types of organizations looked to Manhattan solutions to shift away from concentrating on portfolio reduction into a mode of getting more leverage out of their existing infrastructure.

Manhattan has continued to focus on corporate real estate and facility management research with the December 2009 publication of our extensive white paper on Mobility and the Workplace. We have also done quite a bit of research into the need for higher education to embrace IWMS and will have an article on this which will be published in the March issue of FMJ Magazine. In addition, we have commissioned two research publications on sustainability from the IFMA Foundation which will be published in the first quarter of 2010.

Looking into the new year, we are seeing the continued focus on portfolio optimization (more innovative ways of managing portfolios), but also more focus on Interactive Intelligence by integrating IWMS solutions with other 3rd party information platforms. This further enhances the abilities of Manhattan’s IWMS platform to enable strategic decision making for the most complex of real estate portfolios.

We continue to see a shift towards a SaaS model for software deployment. More and more organizations have made the cultural shift away from the model of legacy perpetual licensing and are abandoning the “behind my firewall mentality” which seemed to permeate the market until recent years.Today Manhattan provides its IWMS solutions to scores of clients globally on our SaaS infrastructure.

I am looking forward to another remarkable year ahead and to seeing many of you during this coming year. Happy New Year 2010!

- Craig Gillespie, CEO, Manhattan Software