In 2020, Azul, the largest independent Java vendor, received a strategic growth equity investment from Vitruvian Partners – the catalyst for its corporate development strategy. Azul solves a variety of customer challenges, such as optimizing cloud costs, powering performance-driven applications, providing an alternative to Oracle Java licensing costs, and delivering security. Finding the right companies who can add value to its product portfolio is a major priority.
George Gould joined Azul in 2009 to help aid the company’s transition from a hardware and software vendor to a pure software company. Gould ran marketing, product management, and business development. In 2022, Gould transitioned to SVP of Corporate Development to help find additional ways for the company to grow.
“As the predominant open source Java vendor, we’re always looking for ways to expand market share and complement our existing product lines, ” said Gould. “Acquisition of the right company is a viable strategy to achieve those goals. It’s all about strategy, structure, and fit.”
The Azul team had a good understanding of their competitors but they needed to be able to map the bigger picture of technologies and companies available in the US middle market. Web search engines were insufficient to quickly identify companies of interest that fit Azul’s ideal company profile (ICP).
The problem: Azul needed a very specific search tool which allowed them to perform keyword searches such as “DevOps” “CI/CD ” and “Developer Productivity” and return a result set that could be further refined by Azul’s ICP (e.g. company size and funding level) into a readily consumable list of companies.
"To produce a manageable list of targeted companies that fit our ICP, we needed a tool that could combine key information from multiple sources, including LinkedIn for employee information and Crunchbase for funding data.”
Web searches were hit or miss and there was never a single profile that contained all the initial information Gould needed to understand a company’s relevance to Azul. Each search meant at least 2 more searches on LinkedIn and Crunchbase with data that was only partially reliable.
End-to-end business development
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