Advents Sales Group Sees Key Staff Moves; DiMarco Says Geneva Beta May Come Soon

ADVENT Software Inc.'s sales department has undergone a series of major changes in recent weeks, as a number of top staffers have come and gone and the vendor continues to wrestle with key strategic marketing issues.

Advent has hired Dun & Bradstreet Corp.'s Peter Caswell, naming him vice president of sales and professional services. Meanwhile, longtime Advent vice president of eastern sales Lisa Church was reassigned to handle high-end sales. Departing the vendor are senior sales executives Alison Brunz and Woody Wood-- Wood for personal reasons and Brunz to take a job at Advent competitor DST Belvedere Financial Systems Inc.

At the same time, word has emerged that Advent is getting antsy about bringing to market its long-awaited Unix-based global multicurrency portfolio management system--known as Geneva. The vendor has talked to Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder Inc. regarding the yet-to-be-released Geneva and is considering beta-testing the new system there, according to Advent president and chief executive officer Stephanie DiMarco.

DiMarco says that Advent is now beginning a "controlled release phase" of its long-delayed global multicurrency portfolio management system. DiMarco says sales and promotion for Geneva will be handled by only a small number of Advent staff. She says the product will finally be unveiled in early 1995. It was originally slated for beta-testing in the fourth quarter of 1993 (IMT, May 28, 1993), and later rescheduled for release in the fourth quarter of this year (IMT, March 4).

Details remain sketchy as to what lay behind the turnover in the vendor's sales department--and whether strategic shifts and delays concerning Geneva have played a role in those changes. But some sources close to Advent suggest that some members of the sales team have been frustrated by certain recent shifts in the vendor's approach its sales team.

The sources say, too, that many in the firm saw Caswell's hiring as something of a demotion for Church, who--while never officially head of Advent's sales department--had been the vendor's de facto sales chief for the past several years. Church, who formerly reported to DiMarco, now reports to Caswell.

Though DiMarco asserts that Church has been handling high-end sales for almost her entire tenure at the vendor, her formal shift to that sales niche came after Caswell's hiring. As high-end sales chief, Church is responsible for each sale at or in excess of $150,000.

Still, DiMarco says, "There's been very little structural change. Lisa has been involved in large sales for nine years. She does work on all sales over a hundred and fifty. She's handled both large and small, traditionally. And as the company grows, certainly new people will handle the smaller accounts. But these are sort of normal organizational evolutions. We're just growing our sales organization."

Church would say only that "the whole thing is too silly" to comment on in detail.

DiMarco does concede, however, "We have had a few people who have left our organization. People have been fired, and there have been some people that have been counseled out." She adds that "turnover has been normal for a growing organization. When a company grows, people's responsibilities change, people like Lisa, who's a veteran here."

The long-term plans of Wood, a senior San Francisco-based sales executive, are unknown. But by all accounts he left Advent simply to take a break from the business world.

Meanwhile, Brunz, a senior sales executive in Advent's New York office, had been with the vendor for the past four years. Brunz' stint at competitor DST Belvedere won't be her first; she worked for the Boston-based vendor once before, prior to taking her post at Advent.

Meanwhile, separately, Advent lately ran an advertisement in the Boston Globe seeking new sales people to, the ad says, "generate and support new business." Sales candidates should have PC knowledge and five to seven years of experience in the industry.

Regarding the tack Advent is taking with the Unix-based Geneva, DiMarco says: "I don't even have a strategy for selling Geneva to date; right now, the only people who have authority to sell Geneva are myself and Jack Griffin, vice president of marketing. We haven't developed our strategy yet. Our plan is that, unlike our [Windows-based] Axys product, where we shipped out 500 units in three months, with Geneva we're going to take a much more methodical, slow path because it's a brand-new, very complex product. We'll probably have less than 20 institutions using it in the first year, so we won't have a large sales group focusing on it."