I joined Arbor Software on March 18th, 1993. It was a very interesting and exciting place to work. The dynamics between individuals could probably be a good case study in a college class. Very strong personalities in the Engineering department of only about 14 individuals. Lots of conflict, not sure everybody liked each other, lots of fun playing foosball to unwind. The thing that did keep everybody focused was the product and the desire to go public (IPO).
The company eventually merged with Hyperion Software to create Hyperion Solutions. I will be celebrating my 12th year anniversery this March. I believe the company has about 2500 employees. Quite a bit more than when I joined.
Below is a snippet out of an article that describes a decision that was vital to the success of Arbor Software.
btw: Kirk Cruikshank is a graduate of University of Michigan.
The below was written May 06, 1999.
Inventing credibility
The Reflection story underscores an important lesson: Successful PR strategies build credibility at the same time they're building a buzz. For an example, we turn to Arbor Software Corp., a company that went public in November 1995 and racked up the fifth best performance for an IPO in Wall Street history. But just two years earlier, Arbor's future had been, at best, murky.
In that year, 1993, Kirk Cruikshank joined Arbor Software (now part of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Hyperion Solutions Corp.) as senior vice president of marketing. The startup had 32 people and a promising software application, still in beta, that enabled relational database users to slice and dice data into useful information. "The market segment and space [were] not there. We had to build the market," says Cruikshank, now president and CEO of TradingDynamics Inc., a Palo Alto-based startup that develops trading systems and applications for online business-to-business auctions.
Like most startups, Arbor didn't have the money to bankroll a mammoth advertising campaign, so Cruikshank targeted "free" media as he set out to invent a product category. "PR has phenomenal reach if you're good at controlling the message," he advises. Although Arbor hired a PR agency, because of the product's complexity Cruikshank wanted to shape the initial campaign message in-house. But he relied on the agency to supply crucial feedback and to orchestrate a full-blown media onslaught--including a press tour and speaking engagements.
Arbor claimed that its enterprise software made it much easier for office workers and executives to examine huge corporate repositories of data using ordinary computer spreadsheets. Cruikshank's plan: get a prestigious endorsement from an industry guru to bolster these claims.
Who better than Dr. Edgar F. Codd, the father of the relational database? When Cruikshank suggested hiring Codd's San Jose-based consulting firm, Codd and Date Inc., to write a white paper, his colleagues were skeptical. "They expected that he'd say, 'This stuff stinks,'" admits Cruikshank. "But he was a good scientist, open to ideas." The resulting white paper not only endorsed Arbor's software but coined the term on-line analytic processing, or OLAP.
Overnight, Arbor found itself with a highly promotable new product category. Although some competitors and critics discounted the white paper as nothing more than a paid endorsement, Arbor believed it now possessed powerful competitive ammunition. Then Arbor's PR agency, The Horn Group Inc. of San Francisco, noticed that Computerworld's editorial calendar featured an upcoming article on innovations in business analysis software. They pitched the white paper's conclusions to the respected trade publication, and the editors took the bait--an exclusive featuring Codd and his associates' unexpected conclusions.
The resulting story kicked up a storm of controversy. (And the editor in chief of Computerworld printed a retraction a few months after the original story, stating that the staff did not know that the Codd and Date white paper was commissioned by Arbor.) "It had an explosive impact on the industry," recalls Cruikshank. "Controversy is fabulous, as long as it's the right kind." By polarizing the market into camps, Arbor hoped to emerge as the new thought leader.
But the job wasn't over. Cruikshank recalls the advice of spin doctor Sabrina Horn, founder and president of The Horn Group: "[She] said, 'We [have] to evangelize this [the white paper].' So we ran East and West Coast dinners for analysts and all the major trades." For a startup, those image-bolstering meals weren't cheap--about $75 to $100 a head with good wine, appetizers and dinner. In the smoke-and-mirrors game of startup PR, Arbor was following one of the basic commandments: Start acting like a big company (even though you're not).
Arbor knew it was finally playing in the big leagues when competitors started joining the startup's OLAP Council. Gradually, OLAP became a new industry standard. Three years after going public, Arbor Software had 450 employees and fiscal 1998 revenue topping $82 million. It subsequently merged with Hyperion Software in August 1998 in a deal worth almost $800 million.
The full story
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