Q&A: Extensity CEO says focus will be on BI

Computerworld - Golden Gate Capital has completed its $1 billion acquisition of Geac Computer Corp. Ltd. and plans to launch a new company next week called Extensity Inc. with Geac’s financial applications and business intelligence (BI) tools. At the same time, Geac’s enterprise planning software product lines have been moved to another company also controlled by Golden Gate called Infor Global Solutions. Ken Walters, the former president and chief operating officer at Infor who will serve as president and CEO of Extensity, spoke recently with Computerworld about Atlanta-based Extensity’s goals. Excerpts from the interview are below.

What will the company’s focus be? Our focus is going to be on the total needs of the finance groups [in companies] on a global worldwide basis. They are being called on more and more to provide actionable, real-time data into the business operations along with [managing] Sarbanes-Oxley and regulatory requirements. They need to be able to pull information out of the financial systems [and] provide that data to the business operations to allow them to drive decision-making on a day-to-day basis.

Extensity is very well positioned to take advantage of that quickly growing marketplace because we participate in all areas of those financial transactions, from the back office all the way through to the measurement systems and the business intelligence systems that are being put into place.

Within the enterprise BI market, there are several well-established vendors. How do you plan to differentiate yourself? Golden Gate Capital has developed a strategy in the market around assembling specific solutions around specific marketplaces. We are going to be very focused on the financial applications marketplace. We have the backing and capability to not only develop internally the products we currently have, but the capability to do acquisitions to build out our solutions. We’re starting out at about $325 million in revenue, very profitable, with a lot of recurring revenue with a great opportunity to do acquisitions and grow organically. We come out of the blocks as a very global company with strong reach around the world -- we can support customers in all areas of the world.

What specific BI tools will you be offering? Today we have the MPC [performance management] product from the Comshare acquisition that is focused in budgeting, planning and analysis. It is a fully integrated platform.

We’ll certainly be looking forward to what we need to build out based on our customers’ needs. It is a work in process. We touch both Tier 1 and the midmarket, [and] we will continue to do that. Our main focus going forward will be looking at providing a fully integrated suite of products [to] companies in the $200 million to $2 billion range and we have a great opportunity to look at divisions in Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies.

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