V. Weekly roundup
June 21, 2002

Lucent spin-out adapts and looks to grow
By Darcy Evon

EMNS is a company that has seen a lot of ups and downs in the new economy, but as a survivor of the tech wreck and Lucent Technologies' meltdown, it now aims to get on track to become the leading provider of supplier chain quality management software.

The Oak Brook-based company got its start within AT&T about 12 years ago, according to founder and president Bill Benda. Long before the Internet, Benda's group replaced a million paper pages of switch documentation with electronic documentation, giving them deep industry experience relating to electronic storage and retrieval systems.

They took shape as a "web hosting solutions provider," said SVP Kurt Nusbaum, and then looked at markets where they could compete as a stand-alone entity. Turned out that medical imaging, storage and retrieval was a prime market; Lucent (which split off from AT&T) spun them out in 2000 to merge with Health Center Internet Services as their hosting component. Everyone had their eye on an IPO, but then the market died.

"We then bought ourselves back from Health Center with an ulterior motive," said Benda. "We had developed a supply chain product for Goodyear that no one [in the health services company] wanted to pursue because it wasn't sexy. But Kurt convinced me that it could be commercialized. We had the [domain] experience of an ASP [application service provider] from our hosting expertise and decided to make a go of it."

Turns out to have been a pretty good move. EMNS renewed its contract with Goodyear for five years and still does some hosting for Lucent and other clients, giving them over $1 million a year in revenues. With some other customers in the pipeline, they now are looking for investment capital to go full-speed ahead in the automotive supply chain arena and potentially other market verticals.

"Software systems and revenues are [in vogue] again," quipped Benda. "We think we have finally figured out a model that will work in the long-haul."