Rogue Wave Will Hook Up With Ericsson Spokane Software Company Gets Contract With Worldwide Company

Spokane’s software start-up, Rogue Wave Inc., gets a moment in the Comdex spotlight next week, announcing a hefty contract with a global player, Ericsson Telephone.

Rogue Wave representatives on Monday will formally announce a $455,000 deal to develop multimedia applications that Swedish-based Ericsson will use to market new products and services.

Rogue Wave CEO Chuck Watkins said the Ericsson deal - the largest yet for the year-old Spokane firm - will lead to other projects with Fortune 500 firms interested in the company’s software.

Comdex, derived from “computer dealers exhibition, is- the annual high-tech trade show which brings 200,000 techies and thousands of exhibitors to Las Vegas. It is considered the premiere new technology event.

Rogue Wave, which incorporated in November 1999, has grown from less than six employees to 17.

Rogue Wave’s key products are M-Disk, the multimedia-application suite Ericsson will license, and AVISO, another multimedia package that can create on-the-fly customized resumes, digital calling cards and other products.

AVISO is being reviewed by several greeting card firms as one tool to be offered in kiosks for customers to make CD-ROMs.

M-Disk is about to become profitable, but Watkins and others at Rogue Wave believe AVISO is the long-term future of the company.

“We’re close to some major agreements involving AVISO with Sumitomo,” the Japanese conglomerate with hundreds of subsidiaries around the world, Watkins said.

Both AVISO and M-Disk combine high-compression media tools with communication software for data gathering and retrieval.

In Ericsson’s case, M-Disk will become part of an interactive CD the phone company will send to hundreds of thousands of marketing reps and affiliates.

M-Disk runs a program that creates a personal user profile. The program updates itself regularly by connecting to an Ericsson Web site.

Along the way, the program can provide data updates. Company reps can obtain revised event schedules and track changes in new products.

Likewise, the Ericsson M-Disk product could gather data on users’ Web activity or on how much data they’re using over the net.

Ericsson officials say M-Disk will be used in Wavelab - a marketing strategy Ericsson has created to push its new wireless e-commerce and mobile phone services.

M-Disk evolved this year after firms told Rogue Wave they needed a tool to track customer information.

Rogue’s Chief Technology Officer Dave McClave took on the bulk of the software development. By early fall M-Disk had evolved into a five-tier sandwich of compression, email, database management and Web-based utilities.

“We’ve looked around and there’s no other company offering this same product,” said Watkins.

Watkins and company President Marc Gray, had been looking to eventually sell Rogue Wave to a larger digital media company.

But the success over the past halfyear changed those plans.

“Because of future pending projects with M-Disk and AVISO, we’re projecting we could generate $30 to $40 million in the next year or two,” Watkins said.

Now Rogue Wave is looking at acquiring other companies. Watkins, Gray, McClave and others also will need to decide whether Rogue Wave stays private or goes public.

“We’re putting steps in place to consider that (public offering) option,” Watkins said.