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TenFold Corporation (TENF) |
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CEOCFO Current
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This is a printer friendly page! TenFold
is an innovative technology company with a proven technology and an ambitious mission
– to entirely change the way businesses globally conceive, build and use applications BIO: CEOCFOinterviews: Dr.
Harvey, what attracted you to TenFold Corporation and what is the biggest change that you
have made since becoming CEO? Dr. Harvey: “I was captivated by TenFold’s audacious claim that TenFold’s Universal Application technology was breakthrough technology that could entirely change the way business globally build and use applications. When I joined the company, the company was using this technology to build applications for various large businesses. The biggest change I have made is to turn TenFold towards being a technology company that releases its technology directly to the market.” CEOCFOinterviews: How is that working? Dr. Harvey: “About two weeks ago, we reported our first quarter 2003 results, and I am pleased to report that we have now seen five sequential quarters of quarter-by-quarter revenue growth, income growth, and net income growth. In fact, Q1 2003 was our most profitable quarter as a public company.” CEOCFOinterviews: What is it about your technology that is different? Dr. Harvey: “Our technology entirely changes the way businesses conceive, build and use big, complex applications. First, with our technology, business and IT Executives can find a common vocabulary and collaborate effectively around designing and building an application. Second, our technology is absolutely proven and ‘road tested.’ It’s in production use by large, blue-ribbon customers. Third, this technology enables the traditional requirements process to be dramatically accelerated, and in a sense, made real-time. Lastly, on a detail level, our technology automates essentially all the heavy labor that a programmer would otherwise have to do-- like detailed coding and repetitive tasks like frame design. So it frees IT professionals from tasks that can be automated and empowers them to help businesses introduce change rapidly.” CEOCFOinterviews: What is the approach you take for letting people know that you exist? Dr. Harvey: “Traditionally, we have tried to describe and explain our technology. One of our recent epiphanies is that there is a better way, which is a process that we call “VersionOne”. In this process, we ask a potential customer to describe an application they believe would take substantial time and effort (like a person year) to complete. Then we set out to build that application in five to ten days using our technology. This new “VersionOne” process introduces and demonstrates our technology by letting people try it with a simple ‘test drive.’ We will provide one or two of our people to work with them as part of the “VersionOne”.We have a second approach that is in the works. We have announced that we are releasing the next generation version of our technology, code-named Tsunami. We expect to make Tsunami available in a single-user version, downloadable from the Internet, and usable with essentially no training. Tsunami is planned for release in early Q-3. Tsunami will let individual applications developers see for themselves the power of our technology.” CEOCFOinterviews: How do you reach your potential customers? Dr. Harvey: “Our principal source of potential new customers has been referrals from existing customers. Our customers are large, sophisticated organizations, which have Universal Application-powered applications in production and understand the benefits this technology affords. They have begun to share this insight with their colleagues within their own organizations and outside their walls. Secondly, a number of TenFold alumni have joined interesting organizations and have come back to say, ‘we would like to build an application to better our business and we would like to use TenFold technology to do it.’ Thirdly, we have initiated various marketing efforts over the course of last year. These have been focused and limited in scope. That is why we have worked hard to find a way to bring our technology to market in a broader way. We are expecting that our Tsunami initiative will reach out to people more broadly.” CEOCFOinterviews: Will you tell us about your revenue model? Dr. Harvey: “As a technology company, our main sources of revenue are technology licenses and support contracts, as well as services, which we provide on a time and materials basis for training and to help customers build applications.” CEOCFOinterviews: Is there any competition? Dr. Harvey: “We believe that ours is the fastest and most cost effective technology for building or replacing very large scale, data base- and transaction- intensive applications. The alternatives, using traditional methodologies, would likely take hundreds and possibly thousands of man years and be fraught with failure. Today, the biggest competition we have is what one might call the status quo; people try to keep their legacy applications alive or to augment those applications in a limited kind of way because they don’t realize that there is a low-cost, low risk option like the one that we present. There is no other solution that is proven and robust, which provides the speed of development, the quality of application, and the powerful functionality that a buyer really needs. Our technology empowers a brand new kind of business and IT collaboration that entirely changes the way businesses conceive, build, and use applications. The result is applications of higher quality and greater power, built in a tenth the time and a fraction the cost.” CEOCFOinterviews: What do you do to encourage interest from the various technology magazines etc.? Dr. Harvey: “Today
TenFold is at a crossroads. The company came through a very difficult period over the last
few years. We made some mistakes and suffered some of the bludgeoning that went on in the
market. We survived, but it has been a tough turn-around in a tough technology market. Our
focus has been ensuring the satisfaction of our customers and rebuilding our business base
so that we have the kind of solid financial and business foundation from which to grow a
break-through technology company. We have only recently begun to focus on driving
substantial growth at TenFold. CEOCFOinterviews: Please tell us about the racecar you are sponsoring and other creative ways you are going about revealing your story? Dr. Harvey: “That is a terrific story. We have a substantial shareholder who called us after our fourth quarter of 2002 release, to tell us that he was renewing his interest and commitment in the company. He called us following the Q1 release to inform us that he had a racecar that he would make available to us if we wanted to put a TenFold logo on it. This is a terrific example of an individual investor regaining confidence in Tenfold, as well as offering a very fitting way of marketing our technology. We use the vocabulary “speed, quality and power” to summarize what we bring to applications development. This is an opportunity to demonstrate Speed, Quality, and Power on a bright red racecar. It is great to be able to take our technology and the TenFold name forward in such a interesting and fun way.” CEOCFOinterviews: Any final thoughts for our readers? Dr. Harvey. “We are a small company with a proven technology and an ambitious mission. Our mission is to be an innovative, market-leading, superbly managed technology company that brings technology that transforms how businesses globally conceive, build and use applications. That is an audacious goal for a company with a market cap of under a hundred million dollars. We have many blue ribbon customers with important applications built and in production using our Universal Application Technology. We have pragmatism and perspective that was imbued over the last couple of years. We saw many technology companies that had something good to offer the market fail nonetheless. We didn’t collapse under the shake-up in the market because we have great customers, outstanding technology, and a good plan. We appreciate that this is a tremendous set of assets. We are setting out to build a globally significant technology player and to build a strong and able technology company.” disclaimers |
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