Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Chris Erickson, chairman, president and CEO of Red Brick Systems Inc., stands in front of the red brick castle on University Avenue. The fast-growing company had its beginnings in the building and kept the name when offices moved to Alberto Way.

Red Brick software firm is acknowledged for growth

By Frank Stagnaro

One would think that a company with the intriguing name of Red Brick Systems Inc. would be housed in a bright red brick building on top of a grassy knoll. But new brick buildings and grassy knolls are hard to come by these days, and the Los Gatos software firm, which actually began operations in the old red brick "castle" on University Avenue in 1986, had to settle for a modern two-story gray stucco office building at 485 Alberto Way and a nostalgic name it pledged to preserve when it relocated in 1989.

This fall, Red Brick was honored as one (No. 17) of the 50 fastest-growing firms in Silicon Valley by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a nonprofit partnership of governments, business and labor, and the accounting firm of Deloitte-Touche. The recognition stems from Red Brick's startling growth: Over the past five years the company's gross revenues increased by 2,031 percent.

Red Brick is a leading provider of comprehensive, integrated, high-performance software products for data warehousing. Its flagship product, Red Brick Warehouse 5.0, is the world's fastest and most scalable relational database for warehousing, including data marts, online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining.

"What we produce sounds quite complicated to the layperson," says Chris Erickson, Red Brick's chairman, president and CEO. "All that it means, however, is that we give business management the ability to query massive amounts of information built from different data sources and quickly get answers to its questions."

For example, with Red Brick software, a company can quickly determine such information as who its most profitable customers are, what it can do to increase their loyalty, where it can improve productivity and which new products would be most appropriate given its current products.

Erickson points out that firms are constantly collecting information that holds answers to these questions--sales data, types of inquiries, inventories, backlogs and customer profiles are only a few examples.

"But in order for this information to be useful to management, it must be sent to what we call a 'relational data warehouse,' where it is consolidated in a single, easily accessed system," he says.

"Our specialized solutions allow decision-makers to access more detailed data, ask more penetrating questions and receive higher-value answers faster than they thought possible."

Red Brick Sysems began in 1986 as a computing services company specializing in large-scale decision support systems and related consulting.

The company changed direction in 1990, when it decided to become a product company. Red Brick released its first software package in 1993.

The company became profitable in 1994 and has continued to finish in the black since its initial public stock offering in early 1996. The stock is quoted on the NASDAQ exchange (NASDAQ:REDB).

Total third-quarter 1997 revenues were $11.7 million, an increase of 30 percent from $9.0 million in third-quarter 1996. Total revenues for the first nine months of 1997 were $28.6 million, an increase of 22 percent from $23.6 million last year.

Major Red Brick customers include General Mills, the state of Washington, Estée Lauder, America On Line, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and all major long-distance telecommunications companies.

Erickson is optimistic about the long-range future of Red Brick. "Our past success can be attributed to our decision to focus on data warehousing and our insistence that our clients be able to implement our system almost immediately.

"We will continue this approach. But we will also seek to learn more about the businesses we serve. We feel the future is pretty bright," he added

That's good for Red Brick Systems. It's also good for Los Gatos. Red Brick has more than 280 employees, 160 of whom live within the confines of the town.

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