IT specialists Science Systems continues to buck the current downturn in the software market with two major contract wins and an optimistic outlook for the current trading year.

This week the Chippenham based company announced a £2 million order from STA Travel, the world's largest student travel agency which has a turnover of $120 million and 300 offices worldwide.

The firm is ordering the CODA accounting system from Science Systems to give real time financial information to STA managers around the world.

Mark Adams, the chief financial officer of STA, praised the Science Systems solution, saying: "We operate in over 70 countries, so we needed a global player whose soft-ware could handle our large turnover, which arises in multiple curren-cies and involves a host of languages."

Science Systems is also breaking out the cham-pagne to celebrate a major order from France.

The Agence Universit-aire de la Francophonie that's the University Agency for the French Language links French speaking students, teachers and researchers across the world.

Its software systems are used daily by 400 institu-tions in 40 French speaking countries.

Science Systems technology will help it to cope with differing accounting practices in those countries while enabling the Agency to move swiftly on to web based accounting via the internet.

Since acquiring finan-cial software specialists CODA from the ailing BAAN company last year, Science Systems, led by group managing director Dr Mike Love and CODA chief Graham Steinsberg, have turned it into a global leader in accountancy software, with a string of impressive contract wins around the world.

"We are delighted with these two new contracts," said Dr Love.

"This again underline s the high quality of the CODA product range and its growing worldwide reputation," he said.

"Despite the current economic difficulties in the US and Europe I remain confident that Science Systems will continue to deliver strong results and steady growth."

Science Systems, which has divisional offices in Bristol, Reading, Notting-ham and Harrogate, employs more than 850 people.

As well as its CODA accounting systems its other divisions specialise in a wide range of areas, including mission control systems for the European Space Agency, IT services for Thames Water and it has a multi-million pound, five year contract with the Department of the En-vironment which includes developing new e-commerce sites for the UK government.