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Emerging from the Case wars, LBMS sheds its consulting business, moves to Houston and grabs the early lead in client/server process management
To hear many Texans tell of it, life in the Lone Star State is good. LBMS Inc., too, has found its Houston stomping grounds to be downright hospital, Since selling has found its Houston stomping grounds to be downright hospitable. Since selling its U.K.-based consulting business and moving headquarters to the States, the company has taken the lead in the client/server process management race.
LBMS, founded in 1977 as Learmonth and Burchett Management Systems, has transformed itself over the past two years into a software-only provider. The goal, says the firm, is to fill the holes in corporate software development processes. LBMS subscribes to a bestof-breed approach and works closely with such development tool vendors as Powersoft, Software Quality Automation and Microsoft. On the process management side, LBMS competes with paper-based processes and automated systems such as Ernst & Young's Navigator.
"LBMS is trying to move into a largely untapped area" of client/server process management, said Wayne Kernochan, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc., a Boston consulting firm. "They are scaling their toolset for large development teams. They or somebody else will succeed at it."
At the moment, said Peggy Ledvina, vice president of the Application Development Strategies Service in the Reston, Va., offices of Meta Group, LBMS is "without question the leader in the process management marketplace." She noted that the firm has successfully evolved from "fighting the Case wars to become a process management firm."
The key to LBMS's strategy is its effort to define the client/server development process management space with Process Engineer (PE) and related products. Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn., describes PE as the process management market-share leader, and estimates that the product's revenue accounts for 45% of LBMS sales.
Process Engineer was conceived in 1989 when "we decided to take our methodology expertise and convert it into a product," said John Bantleman, LBMS's president and chief executive officer. The product began shipping in 1993.
"People were frustrated in using all the [methodology] books," added Rick Pleczko, vice president of Process Engineer development. "We wanted to write tools to let them throw the books away."
Timing was...