For over a decade, the UK has been a hothouse for business intelligence (BI) software start-ups, but to date none has managed to make the leap onto the world stage. And in February, two further companies – Gentia and Blue Edge – abandoned their ambitions to do so.
Gentia, which started life as a vendor of on-line analytical processing (OLAP) software before moving into balanced scorecard applications, has been absorbed by Open Ratings, one of the new stars of BI. Open Ratings, a supplier of performance and risk analysis software, was founded in May 1999 by Pattie Maes, MIT Media Lab ecommerce expert, Giorgos Zacharia, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab's Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce Initiative, and Stan Smith, former general manager of Agile Software.
The Boston-based company, backed by Dun &Bradstreet, Atlas Ventures and Ampersand Ventures, will rebrand Gentia's BI suite as the Strategic Performance Impact (SPImpact) suite and market it for historical and predictive business analytics. Although it lost out in the OLAP wars to companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Hyperion and MicroStrategy, Gentia built a customer base of around 500, including Motorola, Volvo, Swiss RE and Credit Suisse First Boston.
Meanwhile, the market leading BI company, Business Objects, also pounced on a small UK-based BI venture. The Franco-US software company is spending $6 million to acquire Leeds-based Blue Edge Software, a specialist in software for delivering analysis and reports over the web to consumers and other online users. The technology will be used to flesh out the company's growing suite of analytic applications.
