The company that develops the Coda Financials software has been dealing with a lot of changes recently.

The company formerly known as Coda Financials Inc., was renamed in January as Unit 4 Coda, to reflect its Dutch parent company Unit 4 Agresso NV. Unit 4 also decided last September to create a new company, FinancialForce.com, out of its Web-based accounting product, Coda 2 Go. FinancialForce.com is helmed by CEO Jeremy Roche, while Unit 4 Coda is headed by CEO Steve Pugh.

Pugh stopped by the WebCPA and Accounting Today offices yesterday, and Roche will be coming in tomorrow to demonstrate the new Chatterbox app, which runs on Salesforce.com’s new Chatter collaborative technology (see FinancialForce.com Gets Chatty). The app debuted at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce2 conference in New York.

While Chatterbox leverages new cloud computing technologies, Coda’s roots go back much further to 1979 and the days of mainframes and later minicomputers. Pugh explained how the software ran on old Hewlett-Packard and DEC VAX mainframes, as well as IBM boxes. Many IBM AS/400 minicomputers are still running the software, Pugh noted, as it’s one of the few accounting programs for the AS/400 to have been updated until recently to leverage the newer capabilities on IBM’s i Power systems.

Even as those same systems evolved, Coda has been updating its software, which mainly consists of general ledger, accounts payable and accounts receivable, with procurement or spend management features as well, to run on Windows and different flavors of Unix. The company has resisted going the route of providing a full enterprise resource planning system like SAP, but its parent company markets Agresso ERP for those customers who want to go the route of a full ERP implementation.

Nevertheless, there’s bound to be overlap with its parent and sibling companies. Pugh admitted that Coda is Web-enabled like FinancialForce.com and even integrates to some extent with Salesforce.com, though it isn’t built on Salesforce’s Force.com technology, as FinancialForce’s software is. Despite the overlaps, Pugh noted, “We don’t have fights in the hallway.”