Tango/04 Posts Best First-Half Financials in Its 15-Year History

Published: September 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The OS/400 and i5/OS ecosystem is populated by untold hundreds of privately held software companies that do not talk very much about how much revenue they are generating or how much profit they are making. And because of this, it is very difficult to get a sense of how the overall software business related to the OS/400 and i5/OS platforms is doing. But every now and again, one vendor lets us take a peek into its books.

Last week, as Tango/04 Computing Group was celebrating the 15th year since it was founded, the company crowed a little bit about how good business is. Tango/04 supplies systems management, monitoring, and security software for the OS/400 and i5/OS platform--notably, its VISUAL Message Center, or VMC, product--and also has agent software that allows its tools to reach out into Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms.

According to Raul Cristian Aguirre, the company's chief executive officer, during the first six months of 2006, the company's sales increased by 42 percent worldwide. (Tango/04 did not provide actual revenue figures, as private companies often do not when talking about its business.) Tango/04 has been pushing into the North American market in the past few years, first through partnerships and then more directly, and Aguirre said that revenues in North America had increased significantly during the first half of the year, up a stunning 162 percent. Sales were also up significantly in Europe. Tango/04 set up an Italian operation in 2005, and comparing sales for the first six months of the year, sales tripled from 2005 to 2006; sales in the French-speaking European countries--France, Switzerland, and Luxembourg--were 47 percent higher than the company's target for the first half of 2006, too. The company's French unit has doubled its staff this year and is now expanding into Quebec and several French-speaking countries in Africa. In Asia, Australia, and other European countries where Tango/04 works with partners to sell its products, sales were up 20 percent compared to the first half of 2005.

Since 2003, when Tango/04 restructured its organization and began its focus on IT security and systems monitoring solutions, the company has doubled its overall sales of software and services relating to that software. Tango/04 also bragged that its professional services team has met its contractual obligations with every one of the clients that engaged these services on time for the past two years. This is a stunning statistic, and one that is exceedingly hard to maintain in any growing business. Tango/04 says that the average implementation time for a monitoring or security solution is under a month.

"The strong increase in sales allows us to anticipate that, by the end of the year, Tango/04 will once again break its revenue records across every territory where we operate," Aguirre in a statement. "This confirms the success of our organic growth strategy, our international efforts, our investments in product development, and the value the market places on the ease of use and deployment of our software."

It is a relief to hear a System i software house doing well. And if your software company wants to tell us how you are doing, even if you are not a public company, by all means, hit that Contact Us button at the top of that page and tell me all about it. We all like to hear good news like this.