Injection of venture capital helping rev up software firm

Since then, BII has hired two sales-and-marketing people to bring its staff size to 10, a number that its CEO Roland Mosimann said could double in a year. The increase is meant tohelp BII increase the rate at which it attains customers. The company is on pace to double the number of customers it has within a year, but Mosimann wants it to triple the number instead.

Neither BII nor the venture capital firms that provided the funding, Innovation Ventures LP of Wilmington and Zon Capital Partners of Princeton, would reveal the size of it. "We didn't need that much," Mosimann said. "We just wanted to give our growth a highoctane boost." Mosimann, who has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, co-founded BII in 1996. BII started out doing behind-the-scenes work for other business-intelligence software vendors aimed at helping them help their customers get the most out of their software. About five years ago, it decided to develop business-intelligence software that middle-market companies could afford. It did that by creating software they can access over the Internet through browser programs. This is cheaper for companies because they pay for it as they use it based on how much they use it, rather than with a large upfront licensing fee.

BII calls the platform its software is built on "Aline." Its modules for different applications have names that contain the word Aline and indicate what the modules are meant to do. BII came up with Aline4Sox about three years ago to help midsize publicly traded companies reduce the costs of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley. The software does that, in part, by enabling companies to store all their information related to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in a centralized database, rather than in multiple electronic documents and spreadsheets. BII's target market for Aline4Sox stretches the definition of midsize companies upward, as it includes publicly traded companies with annual revenue up to $5 billion.

French Caldwell, the director of compliance, governance and risk research for technology consulting firm Gartner Inc., said that stretch is necessary for BII to attain the kind of growth it's shooting for. "Where they're going to have the most success is right there with the companies that are, say, $250 million to $1 billion," Caldwell said. "That's really where they've been doing fairly well to date, but to really grow, they're going to have to look at those billion dollar and above companies."