Fleet software provider cfc solutions this week launches the fourth generation of its contract hire and leasing management system Contract Manager, aimed for the first time at major national and international customers.

Earlier versions of Contract Manager have been available for several years and are already in use by 40 medium-sized contract hire and leasing companies including seven in the FN50, says cfc.

However, the scalability of the new product is designed to enable cfc to bid for the very largest deals in the market place and contains technology that will find its way into an entire new generation of cfc products.

Much of this technology has been made available through the company's 'gold' partnership with Microsoft, giving it access to the very latest internet and Windows tools. Contract Manager is the first fleet management solution from cfc to be developed this way.

Andy Leech, sales and marketing director at cfc, said: 'We have been planning to reinvent some of our products as web-based solutions for a while and decided that Contract Manager 4.0 was the ideal product to spearhead the new technology.

'This is a product that will provide a complete management infrastructure across all the key activities of any leasing company that, thanks to its web-based structure, can be implemented in a very short period of time across different countries or even continents.

'For the first time in the contract hire and leasing sector, we have a product that can claim market leadership in terms of its advanced features and will let us compete for major international software deals. We intend to promote it very aggressively.'

Because of its web-based design, Contract Manager does not have to be installed on individual PCs but can be accessed on any machine running Internet Explorer.