My take on BVS is that the new CEO and CFO are releasing the skeletons and sacrificing this years bonus and reseting the bar lower to hit their KPIs next year. It looks to me the CEO renumeration is high enough to do well without the bonus anyway. This is well timed given it would have been a difficult year to hit their targets with the general market decline and situation in the UK and it will buy them time to invest in their products.

Reading the announcement today, my interpretation is that the products are too heavily customised for each client and therefore the effort to maintain all of those versions has become unsustainable. So they need to try to bring each client back onto the same core product. This is a fairly normal cycle for enterprise software where each client has somewhat different requirements and bespoke integrations to other systems. I guess with the current shortage of developers (especially working on legacy code! Yuk), and customers with upgrades overdue it was only a matter of time before the issue would show up in the numbers.

Bravura, GBST, Objective Corp, Technology One will all have these issues of scaling up and manifests as high services to SaaS. They are very different to Xero, Altium and Promedicus which have a single product (per jurisdiction at least) that does exactly the same thing for each client and can scale with increasing margins.