Sippl Investments Portfolio Descriptions |
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 Allocade Improving the scheduling of critical assets in hospitals, such as CAT scanners, MRI machines, Cath Labs and other expensive resources is a major opportunity for the health care industry to both become more economically efficient but also to provide better service. Currently, the scheduling and re-scheduling workflow for these resources is a home-grown solution, and some times no visible solution at all. Allocade provides a turnkey solution that is easy to use, easy to install, and provides instant cost saving efficiencies and better health care delivery for patients.
Andromedia was one of the pioneer’s of web analytics, helping the key early adopters of web marketing keep track of who is using their site, in what ways, how often, and how long they spent on the site. Such products are now a mainstay of web marketing, and are an industry in and of themselves. Andromedia was purchased by Macromedia, and was a great outcome for the fund during the beginning of the thriving years of web company growth.
Sippl Investments is always looking for companies that cross over between being medical technology and information technology companies, and Berkeley Heart Labs met this criteria. They grew as a “pay for analysis” blood lab, that did very advanced analysis of particle size and characteristics of blood lipids that are important to diagnosis, prognosis and progression monitoring for heart patients. But, in addition, they grew a tremendous database of information, in effect, being ground breaking research in and of itself. The company was purchased prior to going to public for a great profit for the fund.
One-to-One Marketing is what put Broadvision on the map, and they led the industry in tools to build and administrate sales-oriented web sites. This company went public and was greatly under appreciated for many months, but then skyrocketed to a market cap of several billion dollars, and limited partners how held the stock through this era of the company’s spectacular rise did very well indeed.
Cast Iron is pioneering easy system integration, using the modern XML technologies of web services and the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). They are still growing and have captured many large corporations with their appealing “appliance” approach to systems integration. We have high hopes for a very positive result with Cast Iron.
A biotech IPO company is something that Sippl Investments is very proud of, and we were able to achieve this with Cardica, which was also purchased at a premium after some growth after the IPO. Cardica broke ground with a revolutionary invention of a “staple-like” approach to replace time-consuming sutures during coronary bypass operations. Reducing the time a patient spends on the heart lung machine, the “pump”, is critical in reducing complications from the procedure, and Cardica’s invention achieved this reduction, and the investors were rewarded for supporting the company through the growth phase.
When Java was first becoming popular it became clear that a relational database written in Java was an important product to bring to market. Cloudscape very quickly came to market with such a product, and was snapped up as a profitable acquisition for the investors by Informix.
Source code control systems are re-invented every few years as the practices of developers evolve. The new practice is for group development in environments where the developers are not all in the same floor of the same building. Distributed, often even world-wide, development is now the norm. This trend makes hosted source code control even more of an advantage over using “the server under Jim’s desk” as the source code repository. Often times the security, backup and usability of a source code control system has been given low priority in the ranking of software development and deployment tools. Using top quality tools, securely run and backed up by a company that focuses on exactly that problem solves this issue more quickly and more conveniently than hosted solutions. The company has been successful with this solution and will now expand their offering to even greater degrees of professional levels of solution development process management for ever larger enterprises.
The Software as a Service (SaaS) has exploded and will become a large part of the software industry, and perhaps the bulk of it over time. Users love to just login to a new enterprise application and start becoming productive immediately. It is the new generation of application software. However, just like prior generations, these applications have few reports, and limited ability for users to create modified reports, or entirely new queries and reports. Demand Reports offers SaaS companies a hosted report writer that THEY can just plug into, so that when their users login to their product, they get state of the art business intelligence and data warehousing. Thus, they are destined to be the report writing tool of the new generation of enterprise software.
Filtini is a start up phase company commercializing the research of Dr. Richard Cote, Chairman of the Department of Pathology at the University of Miami. Dr. Cote has invented many important diagnostic procedures, including monoclonal antibodies that formed the basis for more than one successful public company. With Filtini Dr. Cote has partnered with nantechnology material science experts to produce a microfilter that will tell whether or not a bladder cancer patient is having a recurrence and is in need of further treatments.
When a person joins a group, usually it is pretty easy to manage their interactions with that group. But in the new era of the web a person is probably going to be part of several groups, and they would like their interactions with those groups to be part of their every day computing experience. grouply combines a persons interactions with their groups into their every day tools such as email, and provides a portal for views and interactions into all of a person’s groups in an organized way, leading to greater communication and productivity.
An earlier Sippl investment, Vantive, was the leader in automating customer support call centers and help desks in the client/server architecture of computing. In the web era, where the Software as a Service architecture has proven to be the more desirable way to run enterprise applications, Helpstream is breaking out first to be the leader in this category.
Mike Stonebraker, founder of Ingres, and UC Berkeley professor that pioneered the relational model along with IBM’s Ted Codd, founded Illustra to commercialize his DBMS research that occurred after Ingres, called Postgres. Postgres incorporated the concept of the “abstract data type” and when Roger Sippl, Gary Morgenthaler and Mike Stonebraker sat down to brainstorm what to call this new architecture the term “object/relational” was born. Illustra continues to be a powerful product, after the company was sold to Informix for over $400M and then Informix was purchased by IBM for over a billion dollars.
At the age of 24 Roger Sippl started Informix after selling 10% of the company to his ex-girlfriend for $20,000. Now married, he and his ex-girlfriend are raising three children, but between the age of 24 and 34 Sippl grew Informix on a total of $184,200 raised to have a revenue of $20M with 20% per-tax profit before taking it public after 6 years, in 1986. Sippl continued as CEO for another 4 years, where the growth of the company allowed it to become a leader in the relational database management software industry that it helped pioneer. When sales were near a billion dollars IBM bought part of the company for over a billion dollars, and then bought the remaining parts of the company for another billion dollars a few years later, in the late 90’s. Sippl had moved on in 1983 to be more active in Vantive and Illustra, as well as other ventures such as Red Pepper and Cloudscape.
A spin out from NASA, Red Pepper commercialized the software that Monty Zweben and others built to bring together all of the parts and services needed to get space shuttles launched on time. The logistics of managing a complex supply chain, and the ability to predict problems and work around them, took breakthrough software, with Red Pepper pioneered. Peoplesoft bought the company for over $200M returning great value to the investors.
Dr. Richard Cote is once again using monoclonal antibodies to detect difficult to assay molecules, such as tumor-specific antigens in the medical oncology world, or trace amounts of toxins, in the case of Homeland Security applications. The inventions of Sensitini allow breakthrough sensitivity and specificity, at very low cost. The company is in the early development stages.
Social networking via the web browser is one form of communication using modern devices and networks, but the cellular phone network has potentially been overlooked. SayNow allows group leaders, such as politicians, musicians or other artists with a built-in community, to reach out to and communicate with their members using voice mail messages to large numbers of followers at a time.
When Steve Goldsworthy started Vantive, call centers were keeping track of “trouble tickets” from IT users by placing sticky notes describing the problem on the technicians cubicle wall. Escalating a problem was a matter of moving it up the wall, literally. Vantive changed all that by providing easy-to-use software for tracking user’s problems, providing case-based reasoning to find solutions, and when no immediate solution was found, tracking the problem through the workflow needed to give the user the resolution they sought. This company was a big hit and provided great returns for investors after its successful IPO, and then purchase by Peoplesoft at an even higher price years later. Roger Sippl provided guidance to Steve on the original business plan and served as founding investor and Chairman of the Board during his involvement in the company.
The application server did not exist when Roger Sippl, as CEO, took Visigenic public, offering the concept of “distributed object computing” in an application server architecture, based on the CORBA standards of the Object Management Group. With the subsequent success of the three-tier architecture that Visigenic pioneered, particularly as embodied in Sun’s J2EE products, it is clear that Visigenic pioneered the second most important kind of server, second only to the database server that Informix helped pioneer. Visigenic was purchased by Borland after its IPO to combine the application server with Borland’s advanced Java application development tools of the time.
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