Form+Function CEO Bernard On M&A Roll

Yet Bernard, the former CEO of marchFirst, says that after his new company finishes merging with Groundswell, Pleasanton, Calif., and Normandy Group, Cincinnati, "we won't really need to buy more companies."

Groundswell, which shifted its focus in April to building portals for clients such as Major League Baseball, "brings [us] a services capability in employee relationship management," Bernard says.

Enterprise clients are asking for portals to "hold [employees] accountable, give profit and loss information in realtime and provide a sense of where the company is," says Bernard, CEO of Form Function.

"We're working on customer-loyalty and retention [applications] to help our clients get closer to their clients," Bernard adds. Solution providers "have to understand how to create opportunities, given the market conditions."

Form+Function, which Bernard says has a dozen-plus customers, was able to hire people and purchase other assets of Normandy Group after its deal to be acquired by AdvizeX was scuttled earlier this year. AdvizeX is a Cleveland-based e-business integrator with about $100 million in revenue in 2000.

Bernard says his new company's vendor partners include Cognos, i2, Oracle and Siebel, among others. Form+Function intends to use these and other companies' products to help clients build CRM, knowledge management and other applications, he says.

Other former marchFirst executives have popped up at a number of e-services firms.

Joe Bong, who served as marchFirst's COO, is now CEO of Minneapolis-based Orion Consulting, which was acquired by India's SSI in the spring.

Shortly before marchFirst filed for Chapter 11, marchFirst's vice president of marketing, David Boede, bought back assets of the company he sold to marchFirst. The firm, a digital marketing company called Boede & Partners, is based in Salt Lake City.

"Currently, we don't have any [former] marchFirst people on staff, but that doesn't mean we won't ever," Bernard says.

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