Business intelligence software vendor, Brio Technologies Inc used the closing of its acquisition of Sqribe Technologies Inc yesterday, to outline integration plans including details of new business units and combined product lines.
From now on Brio says it will group both companies’ products under a single umbrella, called Brio One, which is intended to signify Brio’s vision for a common BI platform underpinned by a single set of integrated services. Brio’s analytic reporting tools, now called Brio.Enterprise and Sqribe’s enterprise reporting software, renamed Brio.Report, will come under one division, while the portal software it acquired from Sqribe, renamed Brio.Portal, will form another division. Two other business units, one for professional services and another future products, have also been established Brio said.
Brio, which announced its intention to acquire Sqribe back in February, says it went into the deal with three main goals. First, it wants to become the number two BI software vendor, in revenue terms, behind Cognos and ahead of Business Objects. Currently, the vendor puts itself as number three, behind BO, but with analysts predicting a joint revenue of $120m for fiscal year 2000, it says it’s well on target to knock BO off its number two spot. Its second aim was to create a standard BI platform. Tired of having to patch things together from different vendors, the company says businesses wanted to be able to go to one software house for all their BI needs. We felt there was an opportunity to create a company which could go in as a standalone platform for BI, said Chris Grejtak, Brio’s executive VP, marketing. And third, it wants to be able to extend that platform to ISVs, so they have a standard architecture on which to develop and build their applications.
Grejtak says Brio can now achieve all three of those goals. Typically, the day a company closes an acquisition is the day when the serious integration and reorganization work begins, Grejtak says, but Brio has already got the majority of that out of the way. The month after it stated its intentions to buy Sqribe it started cross-training both sales forces in their respective products. Reselling agreements were put in place (needed until the acquisition officially closed) and Grejtak says the company has already won a number of new customers from co- operative selling.
The European direct salesforce now consists of between 15 and 20 staff in the UK, France and Germany with distribution and reselling agreements to cover the rest of the region. Salespeople sell both Brio and Sqribe as one offering. In the US, the sales are organized slightly differently, with Brio’s team – between 25 and 30 people – selling its software, and Sqribe’s 15 to 20 salespeople selling its offerings separately. Grejtak says the aim is to integrate those teams into one unit over time, but at the moment the company feels it would be too disruptive to customers to start making any drastic changes. We recognized that from seeing the mistakes of other companies, Grejtak said, where we can integrate and it’s best for customers, we will do so. But it doesn’t make sense to uproot relationships that salespeople have worked to establish. The whole game is to maximize revenues while bringing the two companies together.
