but here is an article on the insane story behind the bancrupcy. Even by cycling-standards this is just weird. At least one has to say that Riis was not the only one fooled in all of this.

politiken.dk

for once it’s the sponsor who is making cycling look bad.

here we go. Hopefully he got paid up front. Am thinking no…

CSC goes to visit IT Factory

Having some fun at IT Factory

The guys learn all about IT Factory

More hard work at IT Factory

Did someone say Boo?

Ok, so IT Factory is ten years old and not a start-up but they seem to have changed their business model significantly a couple of years back, moving into a market which sucks money. And they appear to have been pretty profligate in their sponsorship spending this past year. And they appear to have been on the cusp of busting at least once before.

With the homepage of the IT Factory site already pulled, the rest of the site will probably be down as soon as the bean counters realise it’s still accessible via Google. So here’s what the about page used to say:

We bring software to the Internet

For 10 years, IT FACTORY has been successful at developing and selling applications for Lotus Notes/Domino, such as HR and CRM applications as well as out-of-the-box portal solutions. We have been successful because we have gone against the trend. There are lots of applications in which the customers use maybe 10 percent of all features while the customers pay for all 100 percent. We developed our applications for the SMB market and they only contain the features which the businesses actually use. This is of course reflected in the price.

It has been a global success. We have doubled our turnover as well as our profit for six years in a row. We expect a turnover in 2008 of approximately EUR 250 million with a profit of EUR 50 million before tax.

We started to change our business strategy in 2006.

This decision was caused by the widely acknowledged fact that, in the future, software will generally be distributed, serviced, and maintained over the Internet. In other words: The name of the future is SaaS ? Software as a Service. We want to be an essential part of that future. Not as a traditional software supplier, but as a supplier of the tools used by successful developers to build their products.

There are many reasons why SaaS is the future, but there is one that really counts: the price. Figures from leading experts, such as the research company Forrester, indicate that SaaS is 75 percent cheaper than the traditional model.

Only one thing hindered the speedy development of the SaaS market. Existing software was not developed to be provided online. It requires recoding, which typically takes between 1 and 3 years. IT FACTORY has solved this problem. We have developed the first generation of a brand new platform called Platform as a Service or PaaS.

There are many benefits to this platform. Three of them are essential:

    * 1. In a matter of minutes, you can ?adapt? existing software to be delivered, maintained, and serviced over the Internet.
    * 2. PaaS enables any software manufacturer to develop his own new software, and he only pays for using PaaS when he sells his product. We call it Pay as you profit.
    * 3. The end-user does not have to pay a fortune upfront for his new software. He pays an annual fee, which is significantly less than what he is currently paying for just software maintenance. We call it Pay as you go.

IT FACTORY has two overall objectives:

    * To set a new standard for the future SaaS software, and
    * To be a leading global provider of platform and infrastructure services delivered over the Internet.

Facts about IT FACTORY

IT FACTORY was established in 1997. We are headquartered in Denmark. Our global partner service is headquartered in Norway and we have two development offices in India. We have 150 employees in total. We are an IBM Premier Business Partner and a member of IBM?s design team for portals and architecture.

As far as accusing the CEO of embezzlement goes, I’m willing to punt a guess that there’s more of an accounting fraud going on here, a CEO hiding a sick company’s illness by use of creative accounting tricks that have now come unstuck.

on the saxo situation