Brio Completes Sqribe Integration, Unveils New Products
When Brio Technology Inc. (www.brio.com) acquired Sqribe Technologies in late February, many analysts predicted the success of the combined company would depend upon Brio's success at absorbing Sqribe.
Six months later, Brio has completed the integration of Sqribe and its individual components into overall business operations. At the same time the completed union was announced, Brio took the wraps off its forthcoming Brio One business intelligence platform and introduced the first beta of its Brio.Portal 6.0 information portal technology.
According to John Schroeder, executive vice president of products and services at Brio, the company was able to integrate much of Sqribe's technology, sales and marketing assets as early as March, which allowed Brio to hit the ground running with new product announcements and an integrated product strategy by August.
"Even before the end of the merger, we were executing with a single set of applications, a single general ledger and combined sales and marketing staffs; so we were really far along even then," Schroeder says. "Along the way, we made all of our deliverables [the introduction of Brio's Enterprise 6 and Sqribe's SQR 5 software products] and we just announced a planned beta for the Brio.Portal 6.0, formerly a Sqribe product."
Schroeder says Brio's forthcoming Brio One business intelligence platform will address product integration concerns by providing a set of interoperability services that perform authentication, object repository, scheduling and other tasks. Also, Brio will rename and continue to distribute existing Sqribe software and will offer a number of new analytical applications.
"Brio Report, which was previously the SQR reporting product line, will continue as our reporting software [solution], and then we're also going to announce some new Brio applications, which are analytical applications," Schroeder says.
Mike Schiff, director of applications analysis at Current Analysis (www.currentanalysis.com), says the Brio/Sqribe acquisition bucks the trend of many recent efforts because it has been smooth and productive. Schiff notes that most vendors only promise the delivery of new product sets to result from a major acquisition or corporate reorganization; Brio, on the other hand, has delivered -- or will soon deliver -- actual products and services.
"What they've done is instead of saying, 'We've merged and this is what we'll do,' they're saying, 'We've merged and we're already off and running,'" Schiff says. "The launch of Brio One and the beta release of Brio.Portal 6.0 provide ample evidence that the combined marketing organizations are now functioning as a single collective entity."
Bob Moran, vice president of decision support research at Aberdeen Group (www.aberdeen.com), says Brio's combined set of software solutions now extend the company's ability to reach into ERP, legacy and other complex transactional systems to extract business intelligence information.
"The integration as implied in Brio One and the follow-on portal stuff [Brio.Portal 6.0] does not stop at having a business intelligence tool backbone, but penetrates very soundly into the applications arena," he explains. "Brio has been able to create or acquire the mechanisms that allow [it] to access operational data from very complex environments such as ERP systems, transactional systems and other legacy systems."