Making changes to a complex corporate database can be a lot like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, says Andy Hayler, CEO of London-based Kalido. As soon as one end is finished, you have to start all over again. That's the vicious cycle he faced as a global IT manager at the oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell Group.Back in 1996, Mr. Hayler was dealing with multiple, incompatible databases spread across 150 countries. It was impossible to pull together uniform, timely sales and financial data from these disparate systems. Mr. Hayler's solution eventually became the basis for his startup, Kalido.

The usual approach to combining multiple databases is to standardize to a single platform and then convince the various offices and divisions to adopt it, an impossible task in a large multinational. Even if standardization can be achieved, making updates to the databases is a Byzantine process.

Mr. Hayler became convinced that generic entity modeling, at the time only a theoretical concept, might be the answer. This new approach allows you to "take the structure of data and define it as data," he says. "That notion had been around; we weren't the first ones to think of doing this. The difficulty was in how to apply it." Take Coca-Cola for example. In a database, Coke is classified by its properties: a fizzy drink… a beverage. Kalido's technology abstracts these properties so they, too, can be easily manipulated and changed. Then, if a database labels Coke a fizzy drink and another relevant quality is introduced, say "sugary drink," the database can be easily changed to include this new category.

Using the technology, Mr. Hayler and his team turned to a particular problem at Shell: measuring the sales of engine oil. This may not seem especially difficult. But Shell offers 30,000 different products in 45 major countries. "They could never really get a sense of how the business was performing in detail," says Mr. Hayler. "How profitable is a particular product through a particular channel to a particular class of customer in France versus Canada? It's an easy question to ask, but not to answer."

With Mr. Hayler's new database technology, sales managers in the engine-oil division started getting some answers. Soon other divisions were clamoring for their own sales data. The result? Better pricing strategies improved retail sales in Shell's gas stations by 22 percent, says Mr. Hayler.

In 1998, after fighing off internal attempts to kill the project, Mr. Hayler submitted a business plan to spin off the technology into a separate company; he got $15 million in internal funding, and two years later Kalido become the first technology concern ever to be spun off of the oil giant.

Mr. Hayler plans to keep developing Kalido, which is the world's fastest-growing business-intelligence software company by revenue, according to market research firm IDC's annual survey. The company plans to go public in the next two or three years provided, of course, the markets improve.

Mr. Hayler believes his next venture may be to teach large corporations how to exploit their internal inventions and intellectual property as successfully as Shell does. Or, in Mr. Hayler's words, he wants to teach them that "ideas are easy, it's making them work that's difficult."

Sources From:RED HERRING 2002