BI LUMINARY ANDRE BOISVERT SHARES SOME THOUGHTS WITH DSstar
by Tim Staub, managing editor

DSstar: Please tell us about your background.

BOISVERT: I started at IBM as a hardware engineer. I was fortunate enough to have been placed on a management acceleration program there, where I was schooled in sales, marketing, management and product development. I was there for 13 years.

In 1989, I was recruited away from IBM to join a struggling Canadian company called Cognos. I was one of a handful of executives with the charter of transforming Cognos from being strictly a 4GL company to one of being a leader in the business intelligence space. I was also part of the Canadian executive HQ team that relocated to Boston in order to set up the new worldwide marketing and sales hub for Cognos. We executed a secondary public offering on Nasdaq in order to fund the transition and fuel the growth plan for Cognos.

After three years at Cognos, I left to pursue the second turnaround opportunity of my career, and that was Wang Laboratory. After stagnating in Chapter 11 for nearly 14 months, the company's lead creditors recruited me in order to come in and assist the then current management team in formulating the appropriate business plan that would allow the company to emerge from Chapter 11. We were successful in formulating that plan and in transforming the company from being a proprietary hardware company to one of being an open platform software company. In the fall of 1993, the company was able to emerge successfully from Chapter 11 and file for an IPO on the Nasdaq exchange. A few months after the IPO, Eastman Kodak bought the software division of Wang, for which I was vice president and General Manager. I left at the conclusion of that sale transaction with a real sense of accomplishment because the creditors had been made whole and the stockholders had made quite a handsome return.

My planned sabbatical from the industry was short lived. I was recruited by Ray Lane, president of Oracle, to the post of senior vice president of worldwide marketing. For the first time in Oracle's history, marketing, which included product management, product marketing, marketing communication and field marketing, was centralized under one executive. My mandate was that of reorganizing and centralizing all of these desperate units into a fully integrated and aligned marketing machine. In addition to being an officer of the company, I was a member of Oracle's worldwide management committee.

In the spring of 1995, I was lured away from Oracle by an old IBM acquaintance who had become a partner in a very large and prestigious venture capital firm. This firm, at that time, was the majority shareholder in a company that was joint ventured by IBM and CS First Boston, called SEER Technology Inc. I was brought in as part of the executive management team to bring the company public. On June 30, 1995, SEER enjoyed a successful IPO on the Nasdaq exchange. As per my agreement with the company, I stayed on with the company for a period of 12 months of post IPO activities. After that period, I liquidated my financial position in SEER Technology and invested in the Southeast's first "technology only" venture capital firm, South East Technology Funds. In the role of special general partner, I not only advised the fund on where to invest, but I got to run two of the portfolio companies as interim CEO and chief strategist.

In January 2000, I ratcheted down my time commitment to the venture fund by simply staying on as a limited partner in order to free up my time so that I could take on my next challenge, and that was to bring the largest privately held software company in the world public. SAS, with revenues exceeding one billion dollars annually, whose shares were closely held by the two founders for the last 24 years, had decided to go public and had recruited me for the job. With the IPO in mind, I teamed up with Goldman Sachs. In addition to leading the IPO activities throughout all aspects of the company, as president and COO I had the day job as well. Unfortunately, slightly over a year into the process, the founders decided to pull the company out of the IPO process. As a result, the company experienced quite a few executive departures, which subsequently included my resignation in February 2001.

In March of 2001, the chairman of the board of a major, publicly held BI software vendor, who was facing growth challenges, approached me. As a result I teamed up with Bain & Co. Jointly, we are assisting the executive management team of this company with the end goal of formulating a business plan that would see this company back on a growth path that it once enjoyed.

I also continue to be an active partner in two technology funds and sit on multiple boards of directors.

I recently joined the board of directors at Sagent because I believe in its technology. There were multiple entry points for me there. I have known Sagent president and CEO Ben Barnes for many years. I understand the space. Sagent has great technology; that's why I orchestrated the partnership deal between SAS and Sagent earlier this year.

DSstar: Who and what were the key influences in your life?

BOISVERT: My career manager, John Thompson, who is currently the vice chairman of IBM Corp. John showed me the ropes on everything from how you set a business plan, how you motivate and lead a team to execute the plan, how you measure and refine the plan, but that you do not waver from your plan. He taught me some real good qualities of leadership, such as treating people fairly, but not hesitating to make the tough decisions when they are needed.

Ray Lane was also of great influence. He taught me more on how do you organize after a strategy is agreed upon, then execute and measure against it-how do you make adjustments to strategy if need be, but again, unless the world has done an unforeseen 180 degrees on you over night, stick to the plan.

Larry Ellison, with whom I met with on a regular basis when I was at Oracle, taught me very complimentary skills to those that Ray had taught me. It was intriguing working for both. Larry showed me how to remove yourself from a situation and think outside of the four dots, then re-enter the situation and move it forward. For example, when Ray was figuring out how to cap rising pre-sales costs, figuring out "how do I move them to the hottest locations," Larry said we should use Web-enabled software. To give demos to customers over the Web, instead of flying people to a prospect.

An "out-of-the-industry" influence is Bob Ingram, president and CEO of GlaxoSmithKline. He taught me how you can assimilate different corporate cultures, get respect from the troops and get them to follow. There is a lot of value that can be derived when the proper mergers are put together, but all those potential gains and advantages can evaporate rather quickly when the respective cultures are not successfully merged into a stronger single identity. It's the old 1 + 1 must be greater than 2 that you must ultimately strive for.

Another influence is my wife, who is a CFO for a long-running and successful software company. She has always advised me to not just look at the numbers. Numbers are important she says, but they don't tell the whole story; customers and employees do. Basically, she has taught me to listen before judging-not to declare yourself on any issue until you have all of the facts, both from a numeric and personnel perspective.

DSstar: How did you get your start, and how would you characterize the course of your personal development?

BOISVERT: Being in the right place at the right time, in the sense that key individuals had the patience to manage and mentor a wild duck, such as myself. I certainly never imagined starting my career as a hardware engineer, buried in the bows of IBM, that my career would evolve to what it has today. I am grateful to the people that invested their personal time in me, and had patience to do so.

DSstar: What are your current responsibilities, and how do you go about the business of fulfilling them?

BOISVERT: I have multiple fiduciary obligations as a board member of several companies, both public and private, and as a consultant.

I would love to increase how many hours there is in a day. But until then I have found that you need to maximize every hour. There's no real shortcut, but I have to admit that experience saves you a lot of dead-end trips and going down dead-end alleys. No substitute, though, to long hours. And being able to decipher a lot of data quickly and making sense out of it all, then taking the output and making the right recommendations to clients or to the board of directors that you are advising or advising the management team of the companies whose boards you sit on. Tell them where you believe they should be going, not on just pure gut feel, but from solid experience and data.

DSstar: How do you see yourself and your firm within the IT community and the business community at large?

BOISVERT: I represent multiple firms and portfolio companies in which we have invested. Additionally, I provide advise to many client companies or companies for which I sit on their board of directors.

DSstar: What are your views on the current business environment?

BOISVERT: It depends on the business you are in. Like any other economic downturn, this is the time to flush out the businesses that should not be around. I advise my clients to look at the economic situation and adjust their burn rate to be below their actual revenues. Investors may not like the growth rates that this type of action may translate into, but I can tell you that as an investor myself, I like losses lot less than slowed growth.

Anytime during a downturn, businesses need to get closer to their customer who ever that may be. How can I get my unfair share of new customers by offering the right service or product? For companies like telcos, package goods, automakers, etc, this is the perfect time to use business intelligence Software - everyone is sitting on over capacity. O.K., how do I help those companies get to know their customers, market to them with added-value offerings that have a higher chance of sticking with them?

If you take Sagent, for example, the company answers the question "How do you add the "I" for intelligence to CRM, SRM, campaign management. That's Sagent's strength. We are not adding the "e" for e-commerce. We are adding the "I" to inject intelligence to these various CRM, SRM and HRM systems.

Another thing people forget to do in life at a time like this when downsizing the employee base, is injecting the "I" in HR systems so that you can do a quick assessment of your human capital in order to make sure that you are retaining the best and letting go the less productive workers.

DSstar: What advice would you give to others who seek success?

BOISVERT: Unfortunately, many people in this society measure success in dollars. One has to be careful, though, that success is not measured in purely economic sense. Otherwise, you will never succeed. In my mind the right balance between financial independence and personal goals, whatever that is-climbing Mt. Everest, a sailboat, playing with the kids. You're here for one tour of duty no matter your religion, so you better decide what impact you want to have while you are here, whether on your kids or society as a whole. Therefore, if you are not doing what you like, then you better reassess your life and change it quick - time is a product that you cannot buy back once it is used, no matter how much money you may have.

DSstar: Where is your firm headed, and what are you doing to steer it in the appropriate direction?

BOISVERT: As it relates to Sagent, injecting the "I" in every major category: CRM, ERM, SRM.

DSstar: What are the greatest challenges you face in this task?

BOISVERT: A slowing economy. Temporarily. No one knows how long or how deep it's going to go. Trying to convey to customers that during a time of economic slowdown, because of the business we are in, it's really a time to invest in technology. Making customers realize that closing their eyes and hoping things get better is not an option, so they better make an earnest effort to understand their customers and to maximize on their investments - Sagent's technology can help them do this.

DSstar: How would you characterize BI today; what is the "state of the art"?

BOISVERT: Obviously, what helps businesses today is technology, and the technology on all fronts is getting better and smarter. Not just a matter of getting data, but the tools to mine against data is getting more sophisticated. It is able to extract more quality information, not just raw data. Data quality is also improving through the use of technology.

Once you have it, dissemination of it is also getting better. With the advent of the Web, you can get to the data in a more mobile and cost-effective fashion-thin client, and distribute that data more cost effectively, with triggers everywhere in the system. Like being alerted to a flight delay, and given alternatives.

State of the art is the progress we have made in search engines, filtering technology. The capability of profiling individuals, getting data from many sources and building profiles of customers.... in other words targeting relevant data to only the people most likely to want to be a recipient of such data.

DSstar: What will BI become, and what will it take to get there?

BOISVERT: Like any other technology, it evolves through innovative R&D teams who team up with good market development people, building the technology, getting it out there, learning from customer usage, and refining it. So, there is no real magic. It's being able to quickly learn from customer feedback, get that back to R&D, enhance it, and at the same time keep producing new technology and using it like Web and wireless. A few years ago, it would not have been possible to shoot a truckload of data over a wireless network. Now, it's done relatively inexpensively.

DSstar: Please offer any concluding thoughts on topics you consider most relevant.

BOISVERT: Don't let technology drive your life, but use it to maximize it. One thing you cannot ever buy back is time, no matter how much money you have. Make sure you are not a slave of technology and robbing yourself of the limited precious time that you have been given.... instead use technology to maximize time.

Contact Michael A. Piotrowski, Senior Public Relations/Analyst Relations Manager, Sagent, 727-725-9727 x2230, mpiotrowski@sagent.com, www.sagent.com.