Tioga Venture Blog

Cocktail AFDEL à Wimbledon

Pour une fois sur ce blog, un post en français pour un sujet français : le compte rendu du cocktail de l’AFDEL à l’ambassade d’Angleterre le mercredi 8 juillet.

Première découverte de la journée : il existe en plein Paris un terrain de tennis en gazon, comme le centre court de Wimbledon. L’accès reste difficile puisqu’il vous  faudra l’accord de l’ambassadeur de sa majesté pour pouvoir disputer quelques sets entre amis, mais c'est toujours bon à savoir.

Au programme du cocktail de l’AFDEL du 8 juillet, pas de tennis, mais la présentation du partenariat avec le FSI. Après l’introduction de monsieur l’ambassadeur, les présentations étaient assurées par Patrick Bertrand, président de l’AFDEL (et DG de CEGID) et Gilles Michel, DG du FSI. Dans l’assemblée studieuse, de nombreux dirigeants d’éditeurs français ou filiales de grands groupes internationaux.

Pour mémoire, le FSI est le fonds souverain dont la France s’est doté récemment et a pour vocation à investir dans des secteurs stratégiques. La bonne nouvelle de cette journée est que le FSI s’est intéressé très rapidement au secteur du logiciel qui est traditionnellement peu visible de nos instances gouvernementales. Les investissements du FSI ne seront pas uniquement « béton – bagnole » mais aussi High Tech. Parmi les premiers exemples, on notera notamment Gemalto et Nexans (pas vraiment logiciel, mais c’est déjà de la high tech). Reste à espérer que le FSI déploiera aussi des investissements sur des sociétés de taille moyenne. En effet, si les petites sociétés peuvent se financer assez facilement avec les fonds ISF et FCPI (voir le très bon blog de Jean Rognetta sur le sujet ici), il est par contre nettement plus difficile de trouver des tickets entre 10M et 100M€ pourtant nécessaire pour assurer la croissance internationale des entreprises de taille moyenne.

Pour plus de détails sur le partenariat et le communiqué de presse officiel.

Réjouissons nous donc de cette excellent initiative et attendons les résultats concrets.

Frederic HALLEY

Hats off to Instranet

One of the difficult thing in the marketing of a management consulting firm is that you cannot really discuss your customers and what you have done for them. Part of the job is not taking any credit for what you have done. It makes it even better when we can communicate on the success of some companies we worked with some time ago. Instranet (www.instranet.com) for instance was a customer of us many years ago - high tech years are like dog years. Instranet was started in 1999 by Business Objects employee number 1, Alex Dayon. They started as a content management software and web publishing vendor. Through the early 2000s Alex and his team refocused the company on being a niche CRM vendor focusing on complex customer support such as telecom.

In the summer 2008, Instranet was acquired by salesforce.com for 31M$ to complement its CRM offering. Interesting exit as Salesforce is not a very acquisitive company and hasn't done much shopping in Europe. Hence my congratulations to the Instranet team for what they have accomplished over the last 10 years.

What is strinking in Instranet's story is the quality of its management and, something very rare, its stability. The top 3-7 people who have been instrumental to the success of the company had been there since the very beginning. Interestingly so, most of them are still at salesforce.com close to one year after the acquisition.

You can find an interview of Alex Dayon here : http://www.neteco.com/286174-alexandre-dayon-salesforce-instranet-pme-comptes.html.

Details on the deal are available on the instranet web site.

Frederic Halley

Pertinence / intercim : vision becoming reality

This blog has been very quiet for a long time. It was very appropriate to be back on line for a follow up on one of our recent (?!) post. Frederic Halley, one of Tioga Venture partner, was instrumental in the merger of Pertinence and Intercim in 2007. The new entity has now welcomed a new major shareholder with Dassault Systemes. The vision developed back a few years ago at Pertinence is validated by this move: the convergence of the design and shop-floor system is now a reality.

You can read all the details here : http://www.intercim.com/partners/indexDS.asp

Pertinence séduit Boeing et un acquéreur américain

Le jeune éditeur de logiciels français a été racheté par son concurrent américain Intercim.
« L'Europe et même la France arrivent désormais à faire émerger des quantités de petites entreprises innovantes. Elles ont ensuite beaucoup plus de mal à les faire se développer. » Amélie Faure sait de quoi elle parle. Présidente du jeune éditeur de logiciels Pertinence, son entreprise a été rachetée juste avant l'été par un concurrent américain, Intercim. Certes, ce rachat qui s'est effectué par échange de titres a du sens, puisque les deux éditeurs sont exactement sur le même créneau. Intercim, société privée américaine implantée à Minneapolis, est spécialisée dans la gestion du processus industriel. Pertinence a une approche plus pointue, mais parfaitement complémentaire.

Créée en 2000 par de jeunes polytechniciens, elle a mis au point des logiciels permettant d'améliorer ces processus industriels grâce à une analyse poussée des données issues de la production. L'approche, basée sur une utilisation poussée des mathématiques et des techniques proches de celles de l'intelligence artificielle, est très pragmatique. « Il ne s'agit pas de modéliser le processus industriel. De ces quantités de données, nos logiciels déduisent simplement des règles et de bonnes pratiques. On ne sait pas expliquer pourquoi tel ou tel processus physico-chimique marche, mais cela marche. C'est une démarche empirique », précise Amélie Faure. Bien implanté en Europe, notamment chez Airbus, Pertinence se trouve ainsi renforcé par lntercim qui a déjà mis un pied chez Boeing.

L'avionneur de Seattle a été très intéressé par l'outil pour améliorer la production de ses pièces en composite qui vont devenir majoritaires dans son futur Dreamliner - l'objectif étant d'améliorer la qualité des pièces finales et de faire baisser le taux de rebut. « La fabrication de pièces de composite est extrêmement complexe et s'apparente à de la cuisine avec de multiples paramètres : chaleur dans l'autoclave, vitesse de refroidissement, date de péremption des matériaux... Chez Boeing, nous avons multiplié par deux les objectifs qui nous étaient fixés. Ils ont décidé de déployer notre outil sur sept sites », se réjouit Amélie Faure, aujourd'hui directeur général du nouvel ensemble pour l'Europe.

Pas d'acheteur en Europe
L'histoire est toutefois révélatrice des problèmes que rencontre l'Europe pour garder ses pépites. Certes, l'actionnaire historique de Pertinence, Partech, reste au capital. « Nous voulions rester car nous pensons que l'histoire va être belle », explique Philippe Collombel, « general partner » chez Partech International. Mais il ne s'est trouvé aucun investisseur en Europe pour acquérir Pertinence. « Pour les grands européens du logiciel, qui ne sont pas si nombreux, Pertinence est une société trop petite. Ils ne savent pas s'y prendre », explique Philippe Collombel.

Les industriels ne sont guère plus entreprenants, explique Amélie Faure, qui a eu souvent du mal à convaincre de l'intérêt de la technologie : « Chez les industriels de l'aéronautique, on rencontre un très fort syndrome «not invented here» qui tend à repousser tout ce qui n'a pas été inventé dans les murs. Plus la culture d'ingénieur est forte, plus le syndrome est développé. Il y a en même temps un frein à l'innovation. Notre approche est en effet dérangeante pour des esprits cartésiens et suscite la suspicion. » Désormais américain, Pertinence aura peut-être plus de facilité à convaincre les industriels français...

Frank Niedercorn
2 oct 07

Tioga Venture, Strategic Advisor to Pertinence-Intercim Merger

Tioga Venture co-founding partner Frédéric Halley played a key role in Pertinence-Intercim merger, providing strategic consulting services throughout the duration of the negotiations.

The combined company, Intercim LLC, will offer the industry’s most complete enterprise execution solution comprising Intercim’s manufacturing execution software (MES) and Pertinence’s state-of-the-industry manufacturing intelligence capabilities.

“This business merger truly emanates from Intercim’s and Pertinence’s greatest strengths: our mutual focus on customer success,” said Intercim President and CEO, John Todd. “The uniqueness of Pertinence’s causal and proactive analysis solution added to Intercim’s current suite of process planning, MES, emergent process and quality management capabilities fills a vital need for manufacturers of advanced products.”

The combined company will serve European customers from a new division, Intercim Europe, led by former Pertinence CEO, Amelie Faure. “The increases in IT budget allocations for manufacturing systems make this the ideal moment for a global leader to emerge,” said Faure.

“This leader will have to execute deployments for customers in different industries and on different continents, while maintaining unmatched levels of ease of use, quality and return on investment. Intercim is that leader.”

Click here to read the entire press release.

Business Objects Announces its Intent to Acquire Cartesis

Business Objects announces its intent to acquire Cartesis
A French leader strengthens its leading position in the BI market

We were very happy to see one of our long standing customers being acquired yesterday by Business Objects, a worldwide leader in BI.

From a top level standpoint, it shows that France can have great success stories in the software world; analyzing one level deeper, this great success relies on an excellent synchronization of 4 major factors involving a controlled level of risk:

Leadership: Didier Benchimol was able to set-up quickly a world class management team and to transform a service driven company into a leading international software company.

People: Cartesis built its reputation on the talent and recognized expertise of many key people with complementary values:
- In product: the internal architecture relies on the Integrated Data Model that provides numerous benefits for the CFO of continuously evolving large companies.
- In Sales: a strong application culture convinced many Fortune 500 companies that there is “value” outside of SAP, Oracle, etc.
- In Consulting: financial consultants were the preferred consultants in the finance department of large companies.

Market: The underlying market for performance management and governance control is a strong market, driven by the reinforcement of financial regulations (Sarbanes Oxley, etc.).

Investment: Gilles Rigal (Apax Partners) lead a consortium of investors and structured the deal in an LBO at the end of 2003 – at this time, it was quite innovative for software companies to be financed with debt.

Main points of the deal:
- Industry’s broadest platform delivering business insight and performance management for both the CFO and CIO
- Total transaction value of €225M (~$300M) in cash
- Expected to be neutral to slightly accretive to earnings for the first full year post closing and accretive thereafter
- Expected to close within 90 days

Congratulations to all the players who were involved in this great French success!

Comments from blogs we like:
Jacques Froissant's Altaïde
Julien Codorniou's Le Codorblog

A few links for more information:
Interview of Bernard Liautaud on Rodrigo’s blog
Cartesis announcement
Business Objects announcement
Journal du Net (en francais) - BPM: Business Objects doit-il racheter Cartesis?
Boursorama (en francais) - Business Objects: conclut l'acquisition de Cartesis

~Julien Mazerolle

WSJ: Is Microsoft Driving Innovation Or Playing Catch-Up With Rivals?

Is Microsoft Driving Innovation or Playing Catch-Up With Rivals?

Dec 1, 2006 - Microsoft Corp. has put a mountain of money behind its Xbox 360 videogame system and is making another big bet on its Zune digital music player. And after years of research, the company Thursday set in motion one of its most important product launches with the release of its Windows Vista operating system to corporate customers.

But despite the company's marketing muscle, army of engineers and $7.5 billion annual budget for research and development, the software titan finds itself facing real competition on more fronts than ever before. Some threats, like Google Inc.'s ad-based Internet services, are new. Others, like the resurgence of Apple Computer Inc., are not.

As the computing landscape continues to evolve, is the world's largest technology company driving innovation or racing to catch up? The Wall Street Journal Online invited two tech bloggers, longtime Microsoft critic Dave Winer and former Microsoft "technical evangelist" Robert Scoble, to debate the topic. Their conversation, carried out via email, is below.

Click here to read the entire story...

~ Laura Pauli

Press Release: Tioga Venture Hosts 4th Annual International Software Summit in Saint Emilion, France

TIOGA VENTURE HOSTS 4TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE SUMMIT IN SAINT EMILION, FRANCE

Keynotes from Executives from World’s Most Successful Technology Companies

Saint Emilion, France 20 October 2006—Tioga Venture today hosted their 4th annual International Software Summit with executive keynotes from leading global technology companies. This year’s exclusive, invitation-only conference focused on a current challenge in the technology industry: Disruption. Disruption and disruptive technology in its many forms including Disruption Software, Disruption by Regulation, Organizational Disruption and Strategic Disruption have dramatically changed the global landscape.

Click here to read the entire press release in English...

Cliquez ici pour lire le communiqué de presse entier en français...

~ Laura Pauli

Tioga Venture. A venture* consulting firm that drives new technology ventures to success

In today's expanding, though still highly volatile, technology market, any technology venture, as its definition implies, is indeed a risk. From government-imposed regulations to organizational disruption, Tioga Venture, a leading global venture consulting firm, provides expertise to companies who are positioning themselves for significant future growth.

Amidst this volatility, companies need strategic insight to navigate through these changes while still maintaining focus and achieving business objectives. Tioga transcends the conventional consulting services by teaming with top management to build a solid foundation for partnership and long-term growth as well as provide the support and expertise needed to successfully achieve crucial milestones. Leveraging the solid operational skills, visionary thought leadership, bold strategic insight, and past successes of its principals, Tioga Venture drives technology companies to success.

Since its inception five years ago, Tioga Venture has played a key role in the successes of many companies across Europe. Tioga leads clients through transformational change, unleashing new organizational models, value equations and opportunity to sustain long-term competitive advantage for growth and success. And it has the track record to prove it.

* venture: [noun] from aventure, adventure, 1a : an undertaking involving chance, risk, or danger.