Atlas Venture invests $3m in UK software company Choreology

Contact: Katy Birch
Choreology Ltd.
+44 (0)870 739 0056
katy.birch@choreology.com

Tuesday, 30 July 2002, London: Choreology Ltd, a UK-based business transaction management software company, announces a $3m investment by Atlas Venture, the international early stage venture firm. Choreology has received $2m to date and may draw down a further $1m as it meets business milestones.

Choreology was founded in January 2001 by a team of experts in the field of transaction management, who average 18 years of experience in defining, building and marketing transaction management products and solutions.

The company is launching Cohesions 1.0 a software product that significantly enhances the management of business transactions that span and coordinate multiple applications. The product will lower the costs and risks associated with the manual repair processes and bespoke automated solutions used in this area today, as well as easing the creation of new, reliable business services built by composing existing and new systems.

Widespread Applications in Financial and Other Industry Sectors
The management of business transactions spanning multiple applications is a common problem across a broad range of industries and business functions. In investment and commercial banks, applications include STP (straight-through processing), transactional account aggregation, and consistent cross-system information dispersal processes, such as distributed credit approval. In the insurance sector long-running transactions are common in policy and claims processing. Coordination of multiple systems is also needed in industries such as telecommunications where service provisioning, revenue settlement, and billing applications are widespread.

Cohesions 1.0 helps to solve these problems, reliably integrating applications built using current and older software. Technologically low-impact enhancements can help businesses maximize the utilization of existing systems, and can bring a rapid and incremental return on investment in the integration of those systems.

Emerging Technologies and Standards
Today Cohesions 1.0 also brings consistent coordination capability to the emerging Web Services market. In the future it may be applied to new systems which will use wireless networks and the Grid. The product is based on the most advanced candidate for an agreed industry standard for business transaction management, Business Transaction Protocol (BTP). BTP was recently adopted as an OASIS* Committee Specification after 15 months of intensive joint work involving significant vendors such as Sun, Oracle, HP, BEA, Sybase and IONA. Choreology's Chief Scientist, Dr. Peter Furniss, is the editor of the BTP specification.

Eric Newcomer, the CTO of IONA Technologies, and co-author of the well-known book, Principles of Transaction Processing, commented: "As a member of the BTP specification committee, we are very pleased to see the Cohesions product released to the market." He added that "Our experience working with the Choreology members of the team was very positive. The resulting specification is of very high quality, and based on proven principles of classic transaction processing."

Venture Funding and Market Development
"Choreology is pioneering the market for a new class of transaction management software. Already there is a clear need, particularly in financial services companies, for this type of software to be integrated with existing applications, and we believe this need will accelerate rapidly in the coming years as companies in a broad range of industries start to deploy web services. A thorough screening of emerging start-ups and developments at existing companies across both the US and Europe, led us to conclude that Choreology was the company best positioned for success, with a clear lead over the competition," said Atlas Venture Principal Christopher Spray.

Proof of Concept
The next phase in Choreology's development is to pilot the software with one or more financial institutions. "Pilot projects are where we expect the key benefits of our product to be proven", said CEO Alastair Green, who is one of Choreology's founders. "In practice this means lowering the costs and risks associated with existing ad-hoc approaches, such as reconciliation processes to check for inconsistencies, coupled with manual repairs, or overly complex application logic. We believe that our product-based solution can also help enable the rapid creation of new reliable transactional services built by composing or coordinating existing or new systems", he added.

"Our move into the market is greatly assisted by the involvement of Atlas Venture," Alastair Green continued. "They heard of our work, and approached us with a proposal to fast track our company's development and the launch of our product. Atlas Venture is genuinely excited about our potential, and has long expertise in helping to build successful companies. These factors convinced us to go with Atlas Venture as an initial institutional investor," he concluded.