Brio Technology

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Brio Technology was a San Francisco Bay area software company cofounded in 1984 by Yorgen Edholm and Katherine Glassey. It made money early on by doing contract work for Metaphor Corporation and performing contract programming.

By 1990 Brio had developed its first product Data Prism, a database querry and analysis tool.

The next year Brio released Data Pivot, an innovative program designed to allow regular or sequenced data to be totaled automatically. This was one of the first OLAP software applications. The essential idea of DataPivot was added to both Borland's Quattro Pro and Microsoft Excel (Pivot Tables). Also Lotus Improv was built around a similar (though independently created) idea. Brio gained a patent for the idea behind DataPivot ("Cross Tab Analysis and Reporting Method") in 1998.

In 1993 Brio released DataEdit a tool which allowed more direct manipulation of data in relational databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and DB2.

In 1995 Brio gained some much needed funding from the famous venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins. Kleiner Perkins insisted on some management changes (co-founder Yorgen Edholm was made the sole CEO of the company) and the ground was laid for taking the company public. Brio went public (former stock symbol of BRIO - Nasdaq) on May 5, 1998.

Flush with money, Brio started looking for businesses to acquire. In order to complement its technology, Brio looked at and later acquired SQRiBE Technologies. SQRiBE was a small company in Palo Alto, CA with reporting (SQR) and a new portal product (ReportMart). While SQRiBE was the smaller of the two companies, SQRiBE had a much more robust software development, consulting and training organization.

However, the merger with the company SQRiBE (also based in the San Francisco Bay area) in 1999 did not work out well. Although the combined company did reach a record high of revenues in the year 2000 of $150 million dollars (annualized), financial problems were looming. After reporting a net loss for first quarter of 2001, Yorgen Edholm resigned as CEO. Katherine Glassey was forced out of the company a few months later.

Brio, under new management, changed its name to Brio Software in October 2001. The name change did little to improve Brio's fortunes. Losses continued and Brio started looking like a take-over target. Finally on July 23, 2003 Hyperion (stock ticker HYSL) announced it was acquiring Brio. The deal became official on October 16, 2003. Brio ceased to exist at that point though all of its software products are now part of Hyperion's product line-up, as of 2006.

The marriage of the two founders, Edholm and Glassey did not survive the ending of the company they started, their divorce became final in 2004.