UK data warehousing firm Valstar Systems Ltd has completed its bid for financial freedom. It was formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Scottish energy services company Wood Group Plc, and in 1990 the directors staged a management buy-out, with institutional investment from pseudo-government department Scottish Enterprise. During the past six years Inverurie, Aberdeenshire-based Valstar has developed BusinessMetrics, a data warehouse software application and undertook its first data warehousing project about three years ago. Since then, commercial director Jeff Gargan said that the group had shown a 50% growth each year. He’s confident that revenue will be up at 3.5m British pounds for the year to April 1997 and last month decided it had grown sufficiently to break free from Scottish Enterprise. The five directors paid an undisclosed sum for Enterprise’s 30% stake, and Gargan hopes the move will put the company on the right path to becomming the British equivalent of continental success stories SAP AG or Baan Co NV. Valstar said it is not after the IBM Corp-type organization, there are plenty of people out there that can deal with that size of project. Instead focus rests with UK-based small to medium sized firms, and develops its approach from what he describes as the point of pain. If a particular area of the business or a certain process is underperforming, or greater analytical capabilities are needed, Valstar has configured a core approach that can be subsequently ta ilored to an individual firms requirements. Its an area that Gargan thinks is very under developed. He reckoned the only form of competition is from bespoke application builders, but argued that Valstar could have a new BusinessMetrics system up and running within three months, so by comparison a bespoke package would be an expensive, time-consuming option. To coincide with its new-won independent status, Valstar has formed alliances with Oracle Corp and Business Objects SA. Under the agreements, it will incorporate each firm’s technology into BusinessMetrics. Oracle Sales Analyser will help to retrieve structured information – both companies will market the product, and Business Objects’ query and reporting tool will improve the software’s information access and management capabilities. The alliance with Business Objects includes a joint marketing and technology sharing agreement. The company said it currently had an intranet application in beta test and in the mid to long term has aspirations for extending its services across the Atlantic, but for now is content to concentrate on the UK market.
