Business Objects - Business Objects SA's stock climbs - Companies on the Move - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Nov, 1994 by Jack Vaughan

The founders of Paris-based Business Objects S.A. recently enjoyed the kind of day many small software companies hope for. The firm went public on the Nasdaq exchange in late September at a price of $17.50 a share. In less than two weeks the stock had scurried above 30 points. Revenue escalation from $5.5 million in 1992 to $13.9 million in 1993 indicated to Wall Street that the company is on the right path in blooming field of data acces software.

The firm makes end-use decision support tools that are also acceptable to MIS.

Dennis McCann, president of Business Objects Inc., Cupertino, Calif., and veteran of sales efforts at Sybase Inc. and elsewhere, is responsible for operations in the Americas. President, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Bernard Liautaud heads Business Objects S.A. operations from France. Liautaud formed the company in June 1990 with colleagues from Oracle Corp.'s French operation. He had seen a developer present a prototype of software that let users access the Oracle database. Liautaud decided to "do something more robust," isolating users more from the database structures; Business Objects was formed.

"We thought of the Macintosh metaphor--|teach the person to the computer,' not the computer to the person," he said. He insists that decision support applications will be the true goldmine of client/server computing. With armies of end users as the target, Liautaud foresees a vastly larger market than that now held by the top-tier application development toolmakers.

But why pick Nasdaq for its stock offering? Said Liautaud, "The U.S. is the largest of all markets. It is where all the software leaders are." Business Objects, he said, wants to be measured against such firms.