Venturix News - Emerging businesses
Venturix is watching Swissvalor as it could be close to acquiring a mid-sized
Swiss software company to support its new business startegy. This is the third
business plan revision for Swissvalor since its founding last year. It started
out as a portal, then morphed into an ASP and now it is attempting to become
a vendor of its own software.
Another firm that may end up being a newsmaker is Everyware AG. It recently opened a new data center with a champagne celebration and great hopes to become a power player in the local ISP, web hosting, and messaging business. In addition, it offers consulting, evaluation, and installation of Internet solutions.
Everyware claims to be profitable because it has automated many of the processes required to deliver services to its 3,000 business customers, such as order taking, provisioning, customer network configuration, administration and billing.
Compare this to one of the early commercial ISPs in Switzerland, Internet Access, which was later sold to Diax. Diax needed an army, close to 100 employees, to handle its ISP customer growth because Internet Access had not automated the provisioning and order processing. It’s a weak foundation for an Internet business and one of the reasons that Diax has had trouble being competitive.
Another up and com-er is Mortalino . The first web-based business in Switzerland to offer tips, advice, information and tools associated with dealing with death and dying. Mortalino’s CEO, Michael Federspiel, (who is also a business development manager at Venturix,) says the company expects revenues from directory listings, banner advertising and sales commissions.
On the Tornado Insider radar last week, Swissrisk made its debut. It’s
an application service provider (ASP) for integrated portfolio and risk management
systems for use over the Internet. It lists UBS Warburg as its reference customer
and a 750,000 dollar seed round raised in September of last year from Wenger
& Vieli, a Swiss law firm.
vth / 10.4.2001