Rumors of problems at Redwood Shores, California-based Dynasty intensified last week with news of the departure of long-term vice president of marketing Geoff Roach, the rumored lay-off of the rest of the sales and marketing team, and talk that the company had run out of money. Calls to the firm’s public relations company revealed that they were no longer engaged. So is Dynasty Technologies Inc in trouble? It’s difficult to believe otherwise, as barely a peep has been heard from the company since Dutch investment company, European Technology and Finance paid $20m for a majority holding in the application development company way back in November 1996 (CI No 3,047). Nothing came of a mildly-hyped comeback in 1997, and during Dynasty’s time out of the limelight, competitive companies such as Forte Software Inc and Unify Corp were also facing lean times, while Uniface BV had already disappeared somewhere inside of Compuware Corp. The market dynamics of Java and the internet had changed the economics of selling large-scale and expensive application development environments forever, and companies with those kind of monolithic products had to change direction fast. But Dynasty’s Italian chief executive officer, Bani Brandolini, who took charge in April last year (CI No 3,398) denies the company is having problems and maintains that everything is going to plan. We are tracking the direction I originally mapped out he says. Brandolini, who spent 12 years at Hyperion Software Corp, says he is moving Dynasty away from being a mid-range tools product vendor to a provider of very high-end enterprise application environments. Dynasty is working on the establishment of partnerships with large systems integrators to provide application expertise and implementation resources, and says it now has some large company reference sites established, including CBS Inc and DBS Systems Corp, which runs the subscriber transaction management systems for Hughes Electronic Corp’s DirecTV. Brandolini says he expects to announce the identity of its partners over the next few months. Meanwhile, the Dynasty tool has been reclassified as a component-based development tool, and the company continues to build up links between its products and other enterprise software, such as Tuxedo, CICS and OS/390-based mainframe systems. There is also a currently low- profile Dynasty Internet product, using technology from Provo, Utah-based ViewSoft Inc, in which it has a small stake (CI No 3,544). The Viewsoft technology enables Dynasty to link to Java and HTML-based client systems. While Brandolini won’t be specific on the number of recent lay-offs, he says the jobs that have gone are a result of the move from the pure technology and tools area over to project management and large ticket items. We now have a very strong management team of 11, very international, and most recruited afresh, he says. Dynasty is moving to profitability very rapidly and an IPO, or private placement followed by an IPO is apparently still part of the plan for the company. Funding is not a problem, because of the deep pockets of ETF, he insists. Brandolini says he’ll begin talking about the company more once a few more of the essential elements of its new strategy have been put in place.
