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
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