Applications house Geac will need to spend two years rewriting its Smartstream suite and expects to make losses until the work is complete.

Geac had previously anticipated that the rewrite, designed to make Smartstream database and platform independent, would take only one year.

The move is an attempt by the company to broaden the long term appeal of the product, which it inherited with its acquisition of Dun & Bradstreet Software, in order to boost sales.

Smartstream currently only supports Sybase?s relational database and Microsoft?s SQL Server database, which is based on the Sybase code line.

Colleen Niven, Geac?s vice president of research and development for Smartstream, said: ?We had three choices when we looked at how to achieve database independence. We could either focus on NT and Sybase, convert our shared procedures to Oracle, which would have been equally proprietary, or develop a new architecture to bring us more into the 21st century. We tried one, two and three and decided to go for three because it was the only long term strategy, so it made sense.?

She added that the Sybase and Microsoft business was expected to grow at a ?fairly steady clip? over the next couple of years and would keep the unit afloat, but the company needed to support Oracle in the long term because it was the leader in the database market.

But Phil Jordan, vice president of Geac?s international business, explained that the complexity and cost of the rewrite would mean the Smartstream unit would need to be subsidised for two years and was unlikely to make a profit in that time.

As well as making it database and platform independent, the socalled Smartstream Advanced Architecture project would also see Smartstream become object oriented and split into components for easier and cheaper maintenance.

The company also plans to migrate its currently two tier packages to a three tier architecure over time by moving the application logic of the individual modules over to a middle tier server, running Unix or Windows NT.

The mid-tier server will also run a set of common services that will be used by each of the packages, including security, workflow and database management, to ensure consistency.