Polymita garners software's "Michelin Star" (17/03/2009)

Software Company Polymita Technologies, founded in late 2002 by Erik Brieva, a Cuban based inBarcelona, is celebrating these days. Gartner, world´s leading IT research and advisory company has selected Polymita to be part of the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management (BPM).

This means that, after analyzing 150 companies from around the world, Gartner has selected the 44 most powerful companies, and from those chose the twenty best to be included in the Quadrant.

Polymita is the only Spanish company to be part of this Magic Quadrant in which they are rubbing shoulders with giants like IBM, Oracle, Software AG o Tibco. “This is like when you give a chef a Michelin star” says Erik Brieva, president and founder of the company.

Regarding the Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERP), Brieva afirms that in the next twenty years, the boom will be BPM. “Business process management allows to automate every process in a company with the only help of business people, whereas ERP (enterprise resource planning) only allows to automate administrative processes and only with the help of specialists or programmers,” says Brieva

Polymita sells software licenses starting from 30,000 Euros and has the added advantage, according to its founder, that its application is implemented very fast, in one or two months, against the more than four months of its competitors, and allows companies to be more efficient, and achieve important cost savings.

Polymita, which in 2008 had a turnover of 2.7 million Euros, expects to reach five million in 2009 “because our application gives clear benefits to businesses in times of crisis,” says Brieva. This increase will also influence the international expansion process that the company started in 2008 and that will take it from 10% of export sales to between 20%-30% in 2009.

Polymita has thirty five employees in Barcelona, fifteen in Madrid, twenty in Buenos Aires and two in its new office just opening in London that will have ten employees at the end of 2009. With the opening of an office in UK, Polymita strengthens its opportunities at the European market this year. But the company wants more. “After entering the Magic Quadrant we see a range of international opportunities, especially in the U.S., although in order to open offices there we´ll need to get financing for ten million Euros,” explains Brieva.

Polymita counts among its shareholders with Adara Ventures and Molins Capital Investment, both venture capital funds which injected 2,5 million Euros in 2006, and Eurecan, the venture capital fund of Caja Navarra, which invested two million Euros in 2007.

Erik Brieva controls 28% of the capital, Eurecan 22%, Adara and Molins each one of them 19% and the rest is held by employees and managers.

For its next funding round, Polymita is seeking funds from the U.S., but “our current investors would also be participating in this round, “says Brieva.

Source: Expansion (Original article in Spanish available for download)