Onyx software focuses on fast track

AN EXPANDING Bellevue company is finding a strong demand for the Web-based system it designed to help businesses keep tabs on their interactions with customers.

Brent Frei, the 6-foot-7 Idaho farm boy who once plowed wheat fields, is plowing his own path through the heart of e-business territory.

Frei, 33, the chief executive of Bellevue-based Onyx, one of Washington's fastest-growing technology companies, said his company's software helps businesses do something he and his five siblings learned from their parents on the farm: share.

His Web-based system allows a company to know its customers. All a customer's interactions - whether the marketing department mailed the client a flier, sales sold a product, customer service logged a complaint or the person visited that company's Web page - would show up during a transaction.

This means employees can treat a customer appropriately. A repeat customer? A new client? One with a large bank account? One who buys thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise a month? Call up the person's record and get all related information.

"As a customer, I want the people that sell me a thing or service to understand what's important to me and deliver that," Frei explained. "If I tell one person in the company I don't want to be called at home, I want the whole company to know that."

Once a business is linked to Onyx's Front Office software, information can be shared between departments and with its partners via Onyx's Web page. A company's customers can also track what they bought or how their questions were answered.

Onyx software helps Seattle Seahawks customer-service workers solve problems much more effectively, said Emily Forster, database marketing manager.

The Seahawks use Onyx software to manage information on season-ticket holders, prospects and sponsors.

The team is about to open a fourth office, and Onyx allows all departments access to the same information. Customer-account employees even use it in the stadium during games.

"If issues or problems with season-ticket holders arise and they've spoken to an account rep, it's all documented on Onyx," Forster said. "We don't have to worry about being lost."

Although Onyx's 550 clients span many industries, high-tech companies are its biggest fans.

InfoSpace, which builds Internet infrastructure systems, uses Onyx software to stay organized, said Doug Irvine, senior project manager.

A growing company in the high-flying Web world, Redmond-based InfoSpace is making new deals and looking for new partners, and the management software helps track people and progress at any given time, from any division, Irvine said.

"It allows me to keep up with what I'm managing, and the sales-people to go in and find out what's going on," he said.

The Internet has changed the way businesses operate, Frei said. It put the power back in the hands of the consumers, who decide how they will buy.

A small company with no infrastructure and little capital can now compete with large competitors. The Web has forced businesses to become "customer-centric."

"What company will service us better, or treat us better, or know us better?" Frei said, describing the consumer viewpoint. "You cannot have a customer-centric business without customer-service business technology."

He should know. In the early '90s, while traveling around the world for Microsoft setting up business-management networks, he invited 14 software companies to bid on a customer-relations system.

But the only company up to speed in writing business software was the one for which Frei worked. He returned to Redmond and began designing for Microsoft what 14 other software companies couldn't.

It wasn't long before he concluded he could do the job himself. Frei and friends Brian Janssen and Todd Stevenson launched Onyx Software in the basement of Frei's home in 1994.

They worked 18-hour days and spent $160,000 their first year. "We bootstrapped the operation out of our own pockets, and friends and relatives," Frei said.

Before long they found themselves shocked at the $25,000 a month they were doling out to stay in business, but they turned a profit within two years.

The company grew to eight employees and, the next year, moved into a 9,000-square-foot Eastside office. Frei decided to take in venture capital.

"When we opened the door, it was them selling us, not us selling them," Frei said.

He took his company public a year ago, and it raked in $40.3 million in its initial stock sale.

Its shares, initially priced at $13, rose to the mid-$40s then settled in the low teens, but started climbing rapidly in October when e-business companies became the stock market's latest darlings. The share price peaked at $70.125 Feb. 9 and has been trading recently in the mid-$60s.

Analysts expect its stock will climb steadily.

Onyx's customer-relations management software is "in high demand right now," said Jonathan Geurkink, an analyst with Ragen MacKenzie. "Companies want to use software that they can track and retain their customers, and Onyx does that for them."

The speed at which Onyx implements its programs sets it apart from competitors such as Siebel and Clarify, Geurkink added, and it continually beats analysts' expectations.

The company's fourth headquarters, a 100,000-square-foot suite in Bellevue's Sunset North building, houses 275 of Onyx's 450 worldwide employees. The business has operations in nine countries and partners in 22.

Its sales nearly doubled in 1999 to $60.5 million with a loss of $444,000, compared with a loss of nearly $7 million in the previous year. In September, it topped Deloitte & Touche's list of Washington's "Fast 50."

Onyx will continue to increase its market share, Frei said, and expand into new industries.

Dori Stubbs' phone message number is 206-464-2792. Her e-mail address is:dstubbs@seattletimes.com