Two former Arthur Young consultants started Brio in 1989 to fix a daily annoyance. Business people had questions about sales, costs and customers, and the answers sat in databases only programmers could reach. Every report meant a ticket and a wait. Brio's software let users ask the questions themselves, pull the data, and turn it into tables and charts. By its 1998 offering, the Palo Alto company sold to large enterprises across the country.

Pointing and Clicking at Data

Yorgen Edholm and Katherine Glassey worked at Arthur Young in New York, where they co-founded a group that used personal computers to help managers make decisions from corporate data. At Brio, Edholm served as president and Glassey as an executive vice president. Their product, BrioQuery, put a friendly front end on corporate databases and ran within the systems companies already owned. Later versions reached users through the web and email. The pitch was freedom for business users and less work for the IT department.

Eleven Dollars, Then Hyperion

Brio priced its offering at $11 a share in May 1998 and listed on Nasdaq. The business intelligence market grew crowded, with Business Objects, Cognos and others chasing the same buyers. Brio grew through the boom, then struggled as tech budgets were cut after 2000. In 2003 Hyperion Solutions bought Brio to add reporting tools to its planning software. Oracle bought Hyperion in 2007.

Cover: Galloping Horse, Edvard Munch. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a galloping horse (brio, vigor).