Form+Function CEO Bernard On M&A Roll

By Amy Rogers, CRN
August 02, 2001 12:41 PM ET

Robert Bernard's latest e-services firm, Form+Function, is on a merger and acquisition roll this week.

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.

Related: Videos | Slide Shows | ChannelCasts | Comments

More Channel Programs

Comments by Vanilla

	Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week For the week ending Feb. 10, CRN looks at five companies that were either asleep at the wheel or just didn't make good decisions.
	Five Companies That Came To Win This Week For the week ending Feb. 10, CRN looks at five companies that brought their 'A' game and made moves to beat out competitors
	10 Challenges That HP Wants Partners To Tackle Right Now CRN speaks with HP's business unit chiefs to get a sense of where they'd like partners to focus in the coming year, as well as how CEO Meg Whitman is making a difference.
	More Slide Shows