As a technology-driven research company, Acre, Inc. had opportunities to venture into related businesses. Two investments come to mind. The first was predictive analytics through SPSS. SPSS is an important component of acre, Inc.’s corporate journey. The second, which will be the subject of another article, was performance management.I visited the SPSS office in the Spring of 1989 and met with Chris Havanagh, then the President for SPSS International. In that meeting, we explored the possibility of Acre representing SPSS in the Philippines. At that time, it was rather difficult to get a licensed copy of SPSS and get the assistance or training for using SPSS. Chris had a beautiful corner room in one of the prestigious buildings along Michigan Avenue. It had a view of Lake Michigan in all its splendor.
Chris and his international team were in the process of rebuilding and strengthening SPSS, Inc.’s presence in Asia. Until that time, sales and marketing of SPSS were done by a distribution company based in Hong Kong which managed many other software and hardware products. Chris asked me to meet with him in Singapore in July of that year. The meeting in July informally sealed the partnership, a deal that was later formalized in 1991.
SPSS, I learned, was a learning and teaching organization. That very well matched what I thought would be an important corporate policy of Acre, Inc. As a learning organization, it used scientific knowledge engineered by scholars in universities as the seed for developing products and services. As a teaching organization, it promoted this knowledge using information technology as the front-end platform. Its mission then of driving the widespread use of statistics for decision making was also Acre, Inc.’s mission of providing decision makers with analytical tools and analytics for sound decision.
Who is SPSS?
Two themes have dominated the evolution of SPSS Inc. as a company: First, making difficult analytical tasks easier through advances in usability and data access and enabling more people to benefit from the use of quantitative techniques in making decisions; Second, developing a domain expertise centered on analyzing data about people, their opinions, attitudes, and behavior.
SPSS, Inc.’s success was anchored on a collective conviction that analyzing data, and incorporating the results into the decision-making process, leads to better decisions – therefore better corporate results. That was a conviction that also served as an important seed in the development of Acre, Inc. as an enterprise.
SPSS sprung in 1968, led by three young men from different professional backgrounds -- Norman H. Nie, C. Hadlai Hull and Dale H. Bent. Together, they developed a software system based on the idea of using statistics to turn raw data into information essential to decision-making. They named this revolutionary statistical software system SPSS which stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.
The product vision came out of the need to quickly analyze volumes of social science data gathered through various methods of research. The initial design on SPSS was done at Stanford University. The intention was to make this tool available only for academics and not for international distribution.
The product concept evolved through a combination of these professionals’ skills and specializations -- Nie, a social scientist and Stanford doctoral candidate, represented the target audience and defined the parameters; Bent, a Stanford University doctoral candidate in operations research, had the analytical expertise and designed the SPSS system file structure; and Hull, who had recently graduated from Stanford with a master of business administration degree, developed the program.
As is typical of creations born of necessity, SPSS quickly caught on at universities throughout America creating a demand for this product. It became apparent to the three developers of SPSS that they had a viable IT product. An enterprise was born. They had to work on pricing, shipping and other business issues. They made sure that tapes of source code were sent to a small, but enthusiastic, user community, and continually maintained and enhanced SPSS.
The early success of SPSS was directly related to the quality and availability of the documentation that accompanied the software. McGraw-Hill published the first SPSS user's manual in 1970. Once the manual was available in college bookstores, demand for the program, particularly among students and faculty, took off. The rest as they say is history.
Over its forty-one year history, SPSS Inc. has evolved into an international corporation that delivers analytical tools and solutions to organizations around the globe. While customers and their industries vary, they share a common need to gather insight from the analysis of data. The Company's analytical technology from its early beginnings has enabled organizations to learn from the past, understand what is happening today and anticipate the future in order to manage it effectively. Today, SPSS has close to 300,000 installation sites and around 3.0 million users worldwide and the list is growing.
Acre, Inc. as SPSS Partner in the Philippines
As a technology-driven research company, Acre, Inc. had the opportunity of demonstrating to clients and prospects the practical value of using a statistical software for analysis and decision making. In retrospect, the transfer of technology to clients was not easy. Acre, Inc. spent most of the next four years educating the market through seminars and workshops, an investment that did not reap benefits until many years after. It was a mission which we had to do and accomplish.
Fortunately, there were executives from multinational companies and university professors or researchers who were users when they were in the United States. That became the core of Acre, Inc.’s SPSS clients. But the market was huge and the potential great. Spreading the widespread use of statistics in decision became Acre, Inc.’s strategic platform in promoting SPSS and its consulting services.
There were organizational challenges in the early years. First, there were very few statisticians then. The few graduates who were available preferred to work in government agencies or multinational research companies. Even those who were courageous enough to venture into other industries did not have the mental preparation to sell a software product. On the other hand, business or commerce graduates with the appetite for selling and marketing did not have the skills to guide clients and prospects on the value of statistics for decision making.
The physical challenges were formidable as well. The operating system was MS DOS and the system configuration was very lean, not suitable for heavy analytical and computational processes. SPSS was cut up into several modules. The demand for memory and space was much less than if all the statistical and data management procedures were integrated into one program. Although the SPSS MS DOS version and its modular design were designed to work efficiently in the desktop environment, clients were expecting a mainframe performance.
The greatest challenge was administrative foremost of which was bringing in the products and the thick operating manual into the Philippines. There were no clear cut rules on the value of software products which were openly copied and pirated in the local market. There was no definition as to how the product should be valued and treated. The product was essentially knowledge which had value only if a license became available. Without the license, the value of the product was just the cost of the diskette which even at that time was just a few pesos. There were occasions when I had to challenge the assessment of the Bureau of Customs by abandoning the shipment.
Those were challenges that were really cut out for a teaching and learning organization. I must say that these were challenges that Acre, Inc. managed extremely well.
This is Part 2 of a series of articles on the history of acreinc@20. Part 2 talks about the start-up years from1989 to 1994. What is the main purpose of the business? What are the secondary purposes of the business? What markets and customers will the enterprise aim to serve? In what processes should it excel in a business where systems, methods and technology are victims of obsolescence? In what way should the enterprise position itself in an industry dominated by multinational companies or companies that have been operating for many years? This part discusses the important decision-making days and documents the impact of these decisions on the future of the enterprise. Some are book-line strategies and decisions. Some are blue ocean scenarios. For comments, write to abfontanilla@yahoo.com or nick.fontanilla@gmail.com. Source of basic information on SPSS is the http://www.spss.com )
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