Advent Software

San Francisco, CA
$215 million market leader in portfolio management software

Uses SyncDev, Campaign Selling, and M&A on the majority of products including Axys®, Moxy®, APX®, Geneva® and others, many of which are data fed.

Advent’s first portfolio management software product propelled the company to success in the 1980s without SyncDev. But management knew many companies stumble on their second product so the CEO decided to use SyncDev on the next one, a trade order management system, Moxy. Their CFO noted, “Moxy was stalled until we started SyncDev.” During over-the-shoulder SyncDev design reviews of an early prototype, three customers noted, “There are a lot of clicks.” That sent the design team back to the drawing board, contributing to Moxy’s first-release success. Advent used SyncDev on each new product after that: Geneva, Rex, APX, Partner and others. Most Advent products take data feeds from public and private sources, some requiring value-added data scrubbing by Advent. All Advent products were successful on their first release and beyond.

Advent uses SyncDev M&A for late-stage acquisition due diligence and early-stage integration. When Advent signed a letter of intent with an acquisition target the latter had four customers and one prospect. Two customers were using the product. When the transaction closed, the newly acquired business had already grown to seven customers and 21 prospects. All customers were, by then, users. A year later Advent had 35 customers in this business unit. Synchronously acquiring a company, acquiring customers, integrating the new company with the field, and optimizing the target customer, sales model, pricing model, and marketing communications was instrumental in this success.

Stephanie DiMarco, CEO, said in 2008, “We haven’t made a single product mistake.”