CAST has grown over the years from a start-up company founded by Vincent Delaroche to become an international software vendor serving the needs of Global 2000 companies in Europe and North America.

A series of consulting projects for major French IT organizations provided both on-going funding for R&D effort and valuable customer input to refine market requirements for the core technology and features of upcoming CAST products.

The company launched its first software product, source code analysis for client-server systems, at the end of 1995. In just four years, product revenue grew from zero to €13.8M, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45% over the period while continuously maintaining positive EBIT. This performance allowed the company to fund its early expansion entirely from its own operations.

CAST went public in May 1999 and raised €4.5M on the Euronext market in Paris in order to accelerate its product development efforts and to expand its worldwide operations.

CAST launched its Application Mining Suite for distributed environments in 2000 and kept investing in its U.S. operations, establishing local field offices in New York, Washington DC and Chicago to provide national coverage. The company also expanded its presence throughout Europe (London, Munich, Milan, Madrid and Brussels). As a result, software revenue outside of France increased to 70% of total software revenue.

he post-bubble decline in IT capital spending had been a challenge for CAST as it had been for the rest of the software industry. Fortunately, CAST Application Intelligence provides very tangible benefits which are even more relevant during these difficult times. These include direct cost savings, increased execution speed and improved management control. CAST performed relatively well, despite the challenge of selling leading-edge technology into a world of shrinking corporate IT budgets. Initially, the halt in revenue growth resulted in the first losses ever in CAST’s history. However, the company quickly adapted and in 2002, revenue grew 5% during a period when many software companies experienced significant revenue losses. In 2003 and 2004, CAST continued to invest heavily in product development (R&D investment represented 15% of overall revenue), to keep raising the barriers to entry for newcomers.

In 2005, CAST launched its current Application Intelligence Platform, an evolution of its successful CAST Application Mining Suite, with a great success in Europe and very promising signs of market traction in the US.

Late 2005 - early 2006, leaving behind him solid and autonomous foundations in France, CEO Vincent Delaroche moved to the United States, to boost the development of CAST in North America and raise Marketing awareness to American standards. The company is now run out of New York City, where key business functions, such as Worldwide Operations and Marketing are handled.

CAST posted excellent results for 2007 with total revenue of €31M ($45M), representing a 34% revenue increase for 2007, with software revenue growth of 41% in Europe and 39% in the United States, where, new license sales jumped by 78%.

A focus on key target segments yielded many new reference customers, including Airbus, Boeing, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Bahn, Samsung, Federal Express, Credit Suisse, HSBC, the Pacifica unit of Credit Agricole, Dexia, the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), CLS, and Kaiser Permanente. The growing momentum of large enterprise-level transactions is an evidence that the business model delivering fast growth and profitability in France is taking hold in the US and other key markets.

CAST has also seen success in the Systems Integrator market. Companies such as CSC, EDS, IBM Global Services, TSystems and LogicaCMG, either launched or reinforced their investments with CAST to increase their productivity and the quality of software applications delivered to their clients, and signed global agreements with AtosOrigin and Capgemini.

Additionally, CAST was well received by IT departments in charge of software package integration, especially SAP. These opportunities will lead to numerous development possibilities within these ISV ecosystems.

At the beginning of 2008, CAST employs 230 people, with approximately 135 based in France, 60 in other European countries and 35 in the US. The company’s management has a controlling voting stake within its governance structure, while being supported by a key long term investor, the German giant Allianz. CAST’s current market capitalization is low which makes for significant equity appreciation. The European financial analyst community is anticipating the successful replication of CAST France’s high profitability level, to the UK, Germany and the United States. Now that most of the structural investment in these key markets is complete, CAST predicts a pattern of double-digit growth and strong profitability for the coming five years.

There are over 650 customers of the Application Intelligence Platform and the company has at least 1,000 additional customers who are users of its legacy mining tools. Among these, approximately 25 are based in the US.

Further references and success stories are available at this page.

CAST’s key targeted verticals are Financial Services, Telcos, Service Organizations and Government.