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SMART: SCOTLAND Supporting Scottish Innovation Case Studies

SCAPA TECHNOLOGIES LTD

Winner of SMART and SPUR ^PLUS Awards

'Scapa Technologies is recognised as a global technology leader, the company is profitable and growing fast. Things are going to get bigger and better as the technology market recovers, but without the continuous support of SMART and SPUR ^PLUS none of this would have happened.'

The Way They Were

Back in 1994, on leaving Edinburgh University's Parallel Computing Centre, Dr Michael G. Norman set up a consulting business subcontracting to other consultancies, analysing the significance and effectiveness of technological developments within the commercial software sector. By 1997 the company, Makespan Limited, was profitable and employed five people, and Michael had been joined by David Mercer, the former Commercial Director of Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, and a veteran of the commercial side of the university's Computing Service.

At this point, Makespan Limited embarked on a project using the industry-leading load testing tool. This type of software tool works by simulating the activity of a large number of users of a computer system and is used to ensure systems operate correctly before they are made available to real users.

The tool was difficult to use, required a very high level of skill in the tester, and was quite expensive. Michael and David spotted a market opportunity in remedying these deficiencies. However, it was very clear that to take on the market leader (now capitalized at around a billion dollars and well established in all global markets including Scotland) their new product would have to be a global innovation, and that the business would require much more investment than was available from the operating profits of Makespan Limited.

Using the SMART and SPUR ^PLUS Award

In 1998, Dr Norman and Mr Mercer set up a second company, Scapa Technologies Limited and applied for SMART funding for a project known as 'Scapa for OLAP' to prototype a new product for load testing OLAP systems - a form of business analysis system popular in the finance sector, the market leader being known as Hyperion Essbase.

The initial SMART 1 Award and its successor SMART 2 led to a product known as 'Scapa StressTest for Hyperion Essbase'.
A pre-production prototype was piloted with various customers at the end of 1999 and taken to market in mid 2000 with the help of a seed Venture Capital round. The product was a quantum leap forward in the performance testing area, but was limited to a very specific niche.

By end 2000, Scapa Technologies had half-a-dozen customers - all of them blue-chip companies, and mostly based in the USA. A venture capital round was sourced in early 2001 to develop sales of the existing product, whilst creating product for new niches in the then-fashionable Application Service Provider (ASP) market. This development was known as ASP-Assure and a SPUR ^PLUS Award was successfully applied for to provide part of the huge investment in R&D.

On September 11th 2001, Scapa Technologies' newly-opened US subsidiary was due to start a major implementation project using Scapa StressTest for Essbase with Deutsche Bank in the World Trade Center. Thankfully all Scapa Technologies staff, customers and other contacts were spared by the tragedy that unfolded, but by the afternoon of September 11th, the software market had entered the biggest recession for 25 years, the market for Scapa Technologies existing product effectively disappeared, the ASP market disappeared with it, and Scapa's very shaken management team soon realized that it was necessary to get a new product to market to maximise the chance of finding someone who was prepared to buy some software.

Luckily, the flexibility within the SPUR ^PLUS project meant that deliverables could be re-arranged and early versions of Scapa StressTest for Citrix MetaFrame and Scapa StressTest for Remedy were released in Q1/02 and marketed to a wide range of organizations using those respective types of systems, rather than just ASPs. Initial customers provided some revenues in a very dark period. The products were refined and extended in the ASP-Assure project to provide Version 2.0 in Q1/03. The final deliverable from the ASP-Assure project was released in January 04 as Scapa StressTest-Express.

The Effect of the SMART and SPUR ^PLUS Awards

By end 2003, although the commercial software market was still extremely depressed, Scapa Technologies employed 22 people was exporting around the world (even making the occasional sale in Scotland) and was profitable. It was beating the established market leader in four out of five competitive encounters and growing fast in a market that according to the International Data Corporation was shrinking and consolidating, and where no other company was gaining market share against the market leader.

All of this was down to Scapa Technologies superior load testing technology developed under SMART and SPUR ^PLUS.
The technology is quite simply more sophisticated and thus easier to use, automating a range of activities that with other tools are laborious, time-consuming and in many cases practically impossible.

In 2003 according to Deloitte, Scapa Technologies was the 6th fastest growing technology company in Scotland (30th in the UK). Meanwhile, however, the world wasn't standing still, the competition wasn't standing still and there were bigger niches for Scapa Technologies to go and conquer, so a second successful SPUR ^PLUS proposal 'Process Analysis for Web Services (PAWS)' was made in late 2003 to build a wider range of products for the emerging Web Services market, to be released through 2005/6, building on top of a collaborative Open Source development project known as Hyades ( www.eclipse.org/hyades) developed with industry leaders such as IBM, Intel and SAP.

Dr Norman said: 'by 2004, Scapa Technologies is recognised as a global technology leader, the company is profitable and growing fast. Things are going to get bigger and better as the technology market recovers, but without the continuous and flexible support of SMART and SPUR ^PLUS through the boom/bust cycle of 1998-2003, none of this would have happened.'

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