What's In a Name?

AuthorGray, Carol Lippert

Three mergers and three new corporate identities in three years would leave any CFO shell-shocked. But Chuck Kane of Ardent is still, well, ardent.

huck Kane was CFO of VMARK Software when it merged with Unidata in early 1998. The two companies had complementary technologies, database products and distribution channels. Therefore, they didn't want the name of the new entity to be a hyphenate, and didn't want to choose one existing company name over the other. They wanted to find a completely new appellation, to reflect their combined identity and the fact that the $112-million baby was born of a merger of equals. Kane, who would stay on as CFO, had only one request of the marketing gurus charged with the task: that the name start with A, so it would jump to the head of the Nasdaq list. The name Ardent was chosen "as an indicator of peoples' feelings in terms of their mission," Kane explains.

Then, in 1999, Ardent acquired Prism Solutions, effectively doubling its data warehouse sales force to 110, gaining 400 blue-chip customers, expanding its mainframe data capabilities, adding SAP warehouse interfaces and increasing its European and Asian presence. Ardent remained Ardent, and Kane remained CFO.

Fast-forward to 2000. Informix is acquiring Ardent as this issue goes to press (the transaction is expected to have closed on Feb. 29). The marriage is creating a $1-billion provider of open software infrastructure for the Internet economy, second only to Oracle. "Informix will carry the Ardent trademark in some capacity, "Kane notes, but the company won't be Ardent any more.

So what's in a name? "What they are buying is the Ardent people and technology, and making them instrumental to the success of Informix," he says.

But don't employees and shareholders find all this re-christening confusing? "My philosophy of business is to do what's right for the customer," Kane says. "Be fair to the people and be honest in every capacity. If that's the mentality and the environment, then everything else flows."

Beantown Boy

Charles F. (for Francis) Kane was born and bred near Boston. He knew he wanted a career in finance after his first year at the University of Notre Dame. "I had to declare a major, and had been in engineering, but finance offered a route to dealing with people," he says. He went on to get an MBA from Babson College and started his career in 1979 at Deloitte, Haskins and Sells, working out of its Boston and New York offices. In 1984, he...

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