Throughout the recession, software specialist Business Micros has been encouraging customers to rent rather than buy its software in order to be able to maximise the benefits without needing to make significant up front investments.

Now, at its financial year end, Business Micros has revealed the success of its campaign with the number of companies choosing to rent rather than buy its range of manufacturing and management software increasing from 32% at the end of 2008 to 50% today.

Graeme Bailey, the company`s Managing Director, says that the figures reflect a growing understanding amongst many within the industry of the benefits of renting software with free upgrades and free technical support from the industry`s market leader. He says: "For many, it was quite a shift in mindset to rent rather than purchase software for the first time but we have worked hard to make our rental schemes very competetive and, as our sales figures show, customers have responded to that."

Business Micros` figures reveal a successful year for the business in 2009, largely bucking the trend across the industry. The company acquired 121 new accounts during the year and handled more than 1000 separate orders - equivalent it says to one every 86 minutes!

Its installations team also made over 700 site visits to existing and potential customers and its software programming team spent an average of 113 hours per week in product development.

Graeme adds: "We have not been afraid of continuing to invest - in people and in resources throughout the prolonged downturn and we are now seeing the benefits of that. We have definitely retained our status as the number one software supplier and we are planning another series of new initiatives in 2010 which will advance our software and service offerings still further."

Posted on 20th October 2009