Evolutionary Says it Still Has Plans to Go Public

Computergram International, April 8, 1999

Data extraction and transformation firm Evolutionary Technology Inc is denying that it lost the head of its UK operations last week because of postponed plans for an initial public offering. Tim Daniels, who according to ETI was only recently promoted to operations manager at the company's UK office in Wokingham, Berkshire, decided last week to leave the company. No reason was given for the departure. His position is to be taken on by Simon Jennings, already in charge of Scandinavia, the Middle East and Africa.

ETI says it is benefiting from the recent increase in profile of the application integration sector, and has just closed the largest deal it has every done with Ericsson NV in Sweden. It says European business is strong, with UK sales showing 100% growth compared with the previous year. Gerard Simon, senior vice president, international operations, said the company has not said anything official about an IPO, nor filed any preliminary documents. "We are still considering it. There has been no delay. We have internal strategic goals, and when we reach those goals we will do it."

Simon said the company, which has 250 employees, was showing "extremely good rates of growth," and funding the growth internally. Its last round of external funding was 20 months ago. He pointed to one of ETI's competitors, Prism Solutions Inc, as a company that went public too early. Last year the loss-making firm was acquired by Ardent Software Inc for $42m.

Last October, ETI launched its new Extract FX data integration management product onto the market, which runs on both Unix and Windows NT servers, and next month plans to release a new set of DA4 data system libraries to support a range of legacy systems. It is also adding multi-byte character support to its products in an effort to expand into the Asia Pacific marketplace, and is working with IBM Corp to integrate its products with MQSeries.