Back in January Artisan was subject to a management buy-out which saw significant new investment and management talent coming into the company. Despite these changes the company remains focused on the sale of Artisan Studio, its all in one UML, OMG SysML and Architectural Framework tool suite, into a broad range of applications.

Artisan’s new management team is headed by Chairman Alan Stevens and Gambrell.

With an MBA, a B.Sc in Business and a Doctorate in Business Administration from the International School of Management in Paris I was surprised to hear that Gambrell’s first job was in real estate, “Selling office buildings and complexes in Chicago.”

“At the time of the savings and loans crisis in the US in the late 1980s, I worked as a consultant with banks and lenders helping them buy and sell-on properties. I ended up helping companies, with a large component of real estate on their balance sheets, to restructure. I enjoyed the work but wanted more operational involvement so the next logical step was to gain more practical experience.

“In the mid 1990s I was appointed chief financial officer at Imagitel, a telecoms utilities company based in Hawaii. I spent a couple of years there and became the CEO growing the company from $1.2m to $55m in sales and from 15 employees to over 700. It was a real wild ride!”

Gambrell worked to take the company public but was frustrated by the Russian bond crisis of 1998. Three weeks from flotation on Nasdaq the decision was made by the owners to pull the flotation and that, in turn, saw Gambrell decide to leave.

“It was a great experience. I gained plenty of operational experience, saw a period of hyper growth, made lots of mistakes, but learned a lot.”

He ended up moving to New York where he took a job as President with a start-up called PowerChannel which offered TV set-top boxes with free Internet access for which users, in return, were required to complete monthly questionnaires on their shopping habits and preferences. Needing a media partner PowerChannel ended up working with Granada Media. As a result Gambrell moved to the UK in 2000.

His experience with Imagitel proved invaluable but a change of direction at Granada saw the deal unravel.

Gambrell ended up moving to Hong Kong in 2001. “It took a year to unwind the Granada joint venture after having built it. But it gave me time to take stock. Career-wise I knew I wanted to become a chief executive of a mid-size technology company and take it public. I also needed more experience of working overseas.” A bit of an Anglophile Gambrell didn’t see his time in the UK as being ‘overseas’.

“I spent three years in the Far East working as a consultant, primarily in the telecoms space, with stints both in the US and the UK. I felt more at home in London and decided to relocate there in 2006.”

Gambrell worked for a small investment bank, Interregnum, that focused on investing in technology companies and it was while he was there, as Managing Director, that he first came into contact with Artisan.

Artisan, formed in 1997, was emerging from what Gambrell describes as a “difficult time.” No longer the ‘new kid on the block’ it was struggling to exploit new opportunities with the limited funding that was then available after the boom of the late 1990s.

Its management got permission to lead a management buy-out which was organised and financed by management, employees and a venture capital vehicle, Quester VCT, managed by Spark Venture Management.

It was while the management team was looking for funds that Gambrell came into contact with the then CEO Jeremy Gould.

“He’d learned of me through Adaptive (an enterprise software company in which Gambrell had invested and become CEO while at Interregnum) and I was initially approached to help finance the buy-out. As our discussions progressed so I got more involved and I was then invited to join the board. Jeremy wanted to focus on sales and marketing. (He’s the company’s CCO) It was a great opportunity.”

So Gambrell found himself parachuted into a new industry. “I have history!” he says with a smile. Twenty years working with some very different companies testifies to that.

“I was lucky. I had some very smart and capable people to help me see the ‘forest for the trees’. What I saw at Artisan was, perhaps, a ‘diamond in the rough’, there was certainly huge potential.”

When you’re new to an industry you can end up asking some stupid questions, “but do you know, those questions can help people focus and work more closely with you.”

The management buy-out came as IBM announced that it was buying Telelogic. With the two largest companies in the market merged Artisan found itself ranked second in the global market.

I ask him what he saw in Artisan. His reply comes in three parts: the technology, the company and the industry.

“The technology we have is incredibly capable; the company had a proven track record built up over 12 years and we have an amazing customer base – for a company our size to have some of the biggest blue-chip companies in the world is something to shout about.”

Accelerated growth
Artisan’s future plans are based on what Gambrell calls its ‘Accelerated Growth’ strategy. I ask Gambrell to explain what that actually means.

“Growth is two-fold and we’re focusing on both breadth and depth here. Our longer term plans include extending our geographical reach – the BRIC countries are a huge opportunity for us – and that will involve us having direct capabilities on the ground and not just relying on a network of distributors, and we need to extend our presence in certain vertical markets. When I talk about depth what I mean is extending our relationships with our current customers, getting on to more programmes and winning work across multiple sites.”

That may be the longer term plan but it certainly hasn’t been a quiet year for the company. At Embedded World in February it unveiled Artisan Studio v7.0; in May it appointed Tess-com Group in Italy as its Italian distributor of Artisan Studio and last month it acquired High Integrity Solutions, a Southampton based company. That acquisition gave Artisan ownership of VdsTM (V-Design System), a fully integrated, collaborative engineering framework for the deployment and maintenance of mission and safety critical systems and software development.

“When I was appointed I said that our mandate was that we should stay true to our technical selves,” says Gambrell. “Our engineers may have a lot of grey hairs but they have years of experience. We aim to offer our customers an honest and open relationship, not one that’s based on marketing spin. Are we perfect? Of course not, but we’ll get better and we’re here to work with them. The more you know us the more you’ll love us and we should focus on that. We’ve been afraid, because we’re small, to stand up and be counted and speak our minds.”

That’s certainly changed under Gambrell’s stewardship. The company’s vision is to deliver an integrated application lifecycle environment that allows systems and software engineering teams to work as one, from concept through to delivery.

“From a customer’s perspective small can often mean unreliable but we like to focus on the benefits and strengths that being small can bring. Customers can get to meet the chief executive, talk to and influence the head of development and even help develop the company’s road map”

Gambrell has embarked on a programme of talking to the company’s top twenty five customers with a view to developing a deeper strategic understanding and relationship.

Artisan’s approach is based on collaboration and providing integrated solutions enabling customers to get the best out of their investment in what are becoming increasingly complex projects.

“Our message is a strategic one. The companies that get it and change direction over the next ten years will have a real and sustainable advantage over their competitors. When we look back in ten years, we’ll laugh at how simplistic mind sets are today.

“We have to understand that our tools are simply commodities and there are some amazing free products out there in the market place. So where’s the value in simply selling our tools? We aim to position ourselves as the ‘gold standard’ in terms of mission critical areas. We’ll come into our own in highly collaborative environments, those divided across 5-10 sites and that cross multiple corporate boundaries. Our message has to be about the total cost of ownership. It’s a value-added message.…. and that’s lost on a lot of individual engineers.

“Design engineers, whether in systems or hardware, need to start thinking more strategically and understand, and value, the work of other engineering teams. Too many teams work in silos. They don’t talk to each other. They often don’t speak the same language.

“We see a world we describe as ‘Work as One’. It’s a world in which all the work is done across a common language, and for us that is UML. We have a product that allows you to share information and communicate. That’s the future. The problem is that too many of our customers don’t facilitate that communication. Performance analysis is all about silos and the individual engineer is told not to pay attention to what goes on around them. Most are compensated on how their part of the chain works, not how the whole team works.

“Some of our customers can have up to 15,000 engineers in multiple locations. So what we’re selling is not just a technology but a solution – and it’s not just a technology it’s a journey. The added value we can bring to the relationship will be the key market driver for Artisan. We’re not a consultancy but I do want service revenues to increase significantly.”

Over a 3-4 year period Gambrell talks of services, that is help with configuration, evaluation and methodology improvements, accounting for upwards of 40 per cent of total revenues from a figure of around 10 per cent today.

“Risk is the number one concern for business. They all know they have to change but embracing change and adopting new methods of work is scary. They’re worried about mistakes and for us that can be frustrating.

“But what we have is a real opportunity through ‘Work as One’ to lead more forward thinking companies down this path towards greater success.”

The Groucho Club likes to talk of itself as being in a constant state of evolution. Artisan, by contrast, is perhaps best described as heralding a revolution. With Gambrell at the helm I think they’ll be leading that revolution for some time to come.

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