IT Factory goes bankrupt. Again.

by Volker Weber

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The Danish cycling team led by former Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis lost one of its main sponsors Monday after software firm IT Factory declared bankruptcy and said its chief executive had embezzled 500 million kroner ($85 million).

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[Thanks, Finn]

Comments

IT Factory had a stand at Lotusphere 2008 but nobody was ever available at the booth. It was very strange.

Bruce Elgort, 2008-12-01

This is unbelievable.

Website says:

IT Factory declared bankruptcy on 1.12.2008 at 11:45

A few weeks ago, they were espousing their big new hosted approach with me. With hindsight, my instinct was that something didn't seem right... they flew too high, too fast the first time, and it looks like nothing changed. Highly suspect there will not be a third incarnation...that brand is tarnished for good.

Ed Brill, 2008-12-01

@Ed - the home page reports that message, but everything else is still intact.

For now.

Gregg Eldred, 2008-12-01

Bad news :-(
And not only for ITF, but also for many of their partners who invested a lot of time into their development framework and are now left alone.
(Not my case, but i know a few who did.)

Hynek Kobelka, 2008-12-01

The funny thing for me is that ITFactory's first failure was a direct inspiration for my SuperNTF application framework. The "problem" with their framework was that it was "too brilliant" in the sense that there was such a steep learning curve that few companies (esp. in the US) were willing to invest the non-billable/non-productive time to get developers trained up to use it.

SuperNTF was conceived with the primary goal of being approachable to even fairly novice developers, precisely to ensure the wide adoption that ITFactory could never achieve. That it is open source helps too.

FWIW, I actually got a client to buy their stuff in 2000, attended their developer conference in Copenhagen in 2001, and shortly afterward was nearly hired by them but that stalled when they started to implode ~March 2001. At the time of the conference they were showing off a new set of developer tools that directly competed with those from Teamstudio - a move I criticized as an expensive distraction unlikely to make enough of a dent in Teamstudio sales to be profitable. 'nuff said.

Kevin Pettitt, 2008-12-01

@ed; Isn't this actually the third time they've gone bust, after twice flying too hard and too fast?

Like Kevin, I was a business partner of theirs in their first incarnation - which started as a Notes-based front-end for Damgaard's Axapta ERP system (now sold by Microsoft as MS Dynamics AX, I believe) - and yes, they'd come up with an almost amazing framework for updating application designs, but the apps that they pushed out just were'nt worth the framework. So you has this amazing framework for updating some apps that weren't good enough for real use, so you'd probably not use them, or if you did, you'd modify them in such a way that you wouldn't actually need their updates any more - and that then made having the framework questionable. What an old director of mine called a "technological triumph" - something that worked, but actually didn't solve any problems you actually had. As Kevin said, it was just too brilliant - but not just in the learning curve, but in that it was so over the top in terms of the problem that it tried to solve that it actually made the whole thing pointless.

Mick Moignard, 2008-12-01

Apparently the CEO, Stein Bagger, embezzled 500 million Danish Kroner and disappeared in Dubai. Also, Ernst & Young voted him "Entrepreneur of the Year" four days before he stole the money, and IT Factory went bust. You cant make this stuff up!

Vilhjalmur Helgason, 2008-12-02

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