Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN), GSE Systems (NASDAQ:GVP), and Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS) are three widely divergent software companies but all are dedicated to turning around an existing software business.
Ari Kahn, CEO, Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN)
Ari Kahn is Chief Executive Officer of Bridgeline Digital, (NASDAQ:BLIN).
Prior to joining Bridgeline, Dr. Kahn was the co-founder of FatWire, a leading content management and digital engagement company.
As the General Manager and Chief Technology Officer of FatWire, Dr. Kahn built the company to a global corporation with offices in 13 countries and top industry analyst ratings.
After winning many of the Global-2000 as customers and growing annual revenues to more than $40 million, FatWire was acquired by Oracle in 2011 for $160 million.
After leading that successful acquisition, Dr. Kahn became Chairman and CEO at the resort development company Great Land Holdings.
He led the company through the 2008 recession and grew it into one of the most successful businesses in the region.
Dr. Kahn received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Chicago.
In this 2,924 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, the highly experienced software executive details his turnaround strategy for Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN).
“I’m one of the founders of the marketing technology space with a company called FatWire.
And I saw Bridgeline around 2016 at an investor conference and saw that it was essentially in an identity crisis trying to make this transition. And I invested in the company and then ultimately came in as the CEO to transform the company.
So today we are a company that is squarely a software company focusing on marketing technology with a very specific mission.
And that is to help our customers grow their online revenue by increasing their traffic, and we’ve got several apps, software apps, that do that, by increasing the conversion of that traffic to their website into buyers, into customers, and we’ve got apps that do that, and then also increasing the average revenue per customer on the website.
So examples for this are, we’ve got apps that help your website have a higher ranking at Google.
This would increase the number of visitors.
We have apps that help those visitors find the products that they want to buy with recommendations, for example, or with enhanced search, so if you’ve got a large product catalog to be able to search through your products.
And then we’ve got products that will help them once they’re ready to check out, make recommendations for purchases, for instance, and increase the amount that they’re going to spend.
So that’s who we are today.
We’ve been publicly traded since, I think, 2007.
But after I came in, we essentially restarted the company in 2019.
I invested, I brought in other investors, and we started doing acquisitions in this space. And we’ve been growing through acquisitions in the marketing technology space.”
Kyle Loudermilk, CEO, GSE Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:GVP)
Kyle Loudermilk is the CEO and President of GSE Systems (NASDAQ:GVP) and also serves as a member of the company’s board of directors.
He is a technology executive whose 25-year career has focused on growing technology companies through organic growth, geographic expansion and M&A, creating significant shareholder value along the way.
In his extensive 4.482 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, the GSE Systems (NASDAQ:GVP) CEO goes over his evolutionary strategy to develop shareholder wealth.
“The origins of GSE trace back over 50 years to Singer-Link Corporation, and it has been a public company since the 1990s, through the combination of three companies that together provided nuclear power plant simulation systems, globally. That company is GSE Systems with the ticker symbol GVP.
I’ve been here for over eight years. I was brought in as part of a turnaround team to look at the company and understand how we can move it forward.
What we did was really focus on the very origins of the business that made the company special, which was serving the nuclear power industry.
We got rid of all distractions, proved that we can be profitable serving nuclear power for that period of time, and then leveraged our ability to be profitable and diversify the company so that we could offer a broader set of solutions into the nuclear power industry.”
The next step in the GSE Systems (NASDAQ:GVP) turnaround story was building on the base revenue stream.
“What we learned was there was a very broad ecosystem of vendors serving nuclear power that were in need of a transition plan: owner-founded, aging out.
And so, we found some opportunity to diversify the business, to provide unique engineering services and white-collar staffing services to nuclear power.
From there, we embarked on a series of acquisitions.
One was True North Corporation that provides specialty engineering choice around programs and performance.
Another was DP Engineering, which does design and analysis engineering work for the nuclear power industry and defense sectors.
Another was Absolute Consulting which provides white-collar “above the shoulders” specific staffing to industry and that was leveraging our history with Hyperspring, which provides training services and white-collar staffing to nuclear power, an acquisition that occurred shortly before I joined the company.
By putting these companies together, we’ve diversified the business.
We’re a very different company today in what we offer to this very unique and special industry, nuclear power and adjacencies in government labs and nuclear defense.
In parallel, we’ve taken the intellectual property, which historically the company would give away to generate engineering projects. We now package that intellectual property to license it and have created an annuity stream for the business that’s been growing nicely.”
Peter Leys, Executive Chairman, Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS)
Peter Leys has been the Executive Chairman of Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS) since 2013.
Previously, from 1990 to 2013, Mr. Leys was Corporate Finance Partner at the Brussels office of Baker & McKenzie CVBA, where he focused on mergers and acquisitions, and capital markets.
Mr. Leys teaches a mergers and acquisitions contract design course at KU Leuven.
Mr. Leys holds a Candidacy Degree in Philosophy from KU Leuven and Master of Law degrees from the KU Leuven and the University of Georgia.
In this 4,492 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, the Executive Chairman of Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS) explains in detail how to manage a software company to success.
“The company started its activities as a typical 3D printing facility where you get files from third parties, and you 3D print them and then you send the printed part to the customer.
But as early as the 1990s we learned that it’s not just the printing that matters.
It’s actually the knowledge that you gather as to how we can print more effectively that really makes a difference.
We got CAD files from customers who were not able to print those products themselves, and we were able to do so.
The customers asked us, “Can you just explain to us how you do it?”
And that’s where we decided very early that next to simply printing parts and sending them to the customers, we should probably package the knowledge that we gather as to how you should print more effectively, turn that into a software package, and then license that software, not only to our customers, but also to our competitors.
And that’s what we started doing as early as the mid-1990s.”
This 3D expertise developed into a multiple revenue streams for Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS).
“The manufacturing activity, which is still there, but basically now has made the move to 3D printing many more end parts rather than prototypes.
And second, our software activity, where we still, as of today, gather knowledge from our colleagues at the manufacturing unit and then package it and send it in the form of new releases, or license it in the form of new releases to our customers…
And then we have a third segment, which is the medical segment, because very quickly, we learned that there’s another way to “valorize” or monetize your knowledge, the knowledge that you gather as you print.
It’s not by simply converting that into a software package, but it’s also by going deeper, going more vertical into a specific activity.
We quickly learned that one of the most attractive segments for 3D printing was the medical segment in general, and one in particular, the medical device sector.
And if I can be even more specific, the sector of personalized medical devices, because with 3D printing at virtually no extra production costs, you can make many different personalized products, which will basically cost you the same as if you were to make a batch of identical products because the printer just prints along, regardless of whether it makes 16 personalized hip implants or 16 standard implants.
And of course, personalization in the medical sphere just adds more value and makes much more sense.
Hence, more openness from that sector to actually venture into the sector of personalized medical devices.
So our medical sector is where we combine, on the one hand, our software knowledge, and on the other hand, our manufacturing knowledge, to make very particular personalized implants and personalized medical instruments for particular sub-segments of the medical device industry.
I refer to, on the one hand, the cranial-maxillofacial sub-segment — in short, CMF — all the bones that have to do with the face.
And on the other hand, the orthopedic sector, the joints like hip, shoulder and knee.
Obviously, I mean, it doesn’t require too much explanation to understand that, in particular, for the face, personalization makes much sense.
People might have a similar knee implant.
When we talk about nose bones, you probably want more personalization than just have the same nose bone that would perfectly fit my face.
And so, the entire sector and also the surgeons are focused on personalization.
Hence, our very successful collaboration with Johnson & Johnson in the field of bringing personalized implants for the CMF market to the U.S. and European markets.
And we have similar collaborations, for instance, with Zimmer Biomet with respect to joints in general, and more, in particular, personalized medical instruments to better place knee implants.”
Learn more about Bridgeline Digital (NASDAQ:BLIN), GSE Systems (NASDAQ:GVP), Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS) by reading the complete interviews with their CEOs, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.
Peter Leys, Executive Chairman, Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS)
Technologielaan 15, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
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