Wheelhouse Technology Lives On In AptSoft

Wheelhouse

A handful of Wheelhouse executives--including Frank Chisholm, who had been senior vice president of sales, and Barry Briggs, former CTO--bought the Wheelhouse technology assets and quietly launched a venture called AptSoft.

The rebirth happened in mid-July but has not yet been officially announced, Briggs said. The company remains headquartered here and retains other Wheelhouse veterans, including David Cameron and Ken Hale.

The old www.wheelhouse.com URL now points to the AptSoft site and describes the company's offerings--AptSoft Director Series--as software that "applies the realtime event-coordination model to aligning business processes across the enterprise, allowing organizations to understand and apply the context of events--that is, why an event happened, not just what happened."

Last May, Frank Ingari, Wheelhouse founder, CEO and chairman, confirmed to CRN that the company was laying off most of its employees and trying to get funding as a software company. This was after a costly and futile foray into hosting CRM on an ASP model.

Briggs said Ingari is not affiliated with AptSoft at this time.

Observers said by mid-2002, Wheelhouse had burned through more than $60 million in venture money in its three-year existence. Wheelhouse entered the world initially as a software company, transitioned into a provider of CRM services via a hosted model, and then tried to re-emerge as a software company.

According to the Wheelhouse/Aptsoft Web page, Lazard Technology Partners is an investor. Wheelhouse investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Charles River Venture Partners.