CAST Company Overview
About Us
CAST is a pioneer and world leader in Software Analysis and Measurement, an automated approach to capture and quantify the quality, complexity and size of business applications. CAST introduces fact-based transparency into application development, maintenance and sourcing to transform it into a management discipline. More than 250 companies across all industry sectors and geographies rely on CAST to prevent business disruption and risk while reducing hard IT costs. With more than $90 million in R&D investment since inception, CAST is also an integral part of software delivery and maintenance at the world's leading IT service providers such as IBM and Capgemini.
Founded in 1990, CAST is listed on NYSE-Euronext (CAS.PA) and serves IT-intensive Global 2000 enterprises and public sector institutions worldwide. CAST has a presence in the Americas, EMEA, India, and Asia/Pacific
Our Vision
Software is obscure, intangible, invisible. You can't touch it; you can't see it. CAST makes the invisible visible. Watch this video to see our vision.
Our Mission
Introduce automated software measurement to transform application development into a management discipline.
“Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured."
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Our Values
At CAST we are all focused on a single goal: being a change agent in the IT industry that brings real value to customers. We take pride in educating the market about transparency and objectivity in application development, its role in accelerating the process maturity of the IT industry and how it significantly affects the software development supply chain. Our mission requires a great deal of positive energy and perseverance, and truly unique people who choose to work at a unique company. CAST values are: Respect- for each other, and for customers, partners, shareholders and suppliers; Directness- doing our best everyday to keep CAST a politics-free zone; and Strong Work Ethic- belief in the moral benefit of hard work and personal accomplishment. Everybody maintains a positive attitude, works together to build a successful and respectable company and shows a strong commitment to our long-term vision and entrepreneurial spirit.
Our Premier Product
The CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) is an enterprise-grade product that has analyzed many thousands of IT applications, ranging from the simple to the 10 mLOC legacies that are the stuff of CIO nightmares. The CAST AIP has been developed in many stages over a 15 year period by a dedicated group software engineers who represent top talent in compiler theory, static analysis and overall computer science. The software engineering ethos at CAST runs deep and the outsize focus and investment we place on product development is unique in the software industry. CAST AIP does not only analyze source code – it understands application structure, its technical design, in its entirety. To this extent, code analysis represents but one tenth of CAST AIP capability and R&D investment. Beyond just being a fine piece of engineering, the AIP never fails to raise eyebrows and elicit excitement when IT professionals first see the level of insight it provides.
To learn more about CAST AIP, please see our product section.
Key Facts and Figures & Equity Distribution
See Key Facts and Figures. The ownership of the company is distributed among company founders, management and employees, as well as public and private investors. Founders, initial stakeholders and public investors own one half, while two institutional investors own the other half. For more information, click here.
Market
The quality, performance and cost of business software applications are boardroom issues for any IT-intensive organization. Most applications are complex, built on multiple technologies and developed by disparate teams spread across the globe. Without measuring the structural quality of an application, it is just a big, expensive black box with the sources of risk and costs to the business hidden behind innocuous status reports that fail to reveal the dangers that lie within.
Today, the situation only continues to get more and more volatile with offshore and multi-sourcing strategies, growing interconnections and interdependencies between IT systems, soaring security threats, cloud computing and its new governance requirements, and the spread of mobile computing in and around the enterprise. The convergence of these factors makes Software Analysis & Measurement (SAM) a very hot, accelerating market. As IT organizations reach a complexity and maturity level that necessitates industrialization, SAM is becoming an absolute must have.
History and Outlook
CAST has grown over the years from a French start-up company founded by Vincent Delaroche to become an international software vendor serving the needs of Global 2000 companies and major Systems Integrators throughout Europe, North America and India.
1996 – 2000: Rapid self-financed growth in France. After six years of initial R&D effort, the company launched its first Software Analysis & Measurement product in early 1996. In just four years, product revenue in France grew to €13.8M, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45% while continuously maintaining positive EBIT. To accelerate its product development efforts and expand its worldwide operations, CAST went public in May 1999 on the Euronext market in Paris.
2001 – 2005: Preparing for renewed growth after software industry turbulence. Rapid geographic expansion throughout Europe (London, Munich, Milan, Madrid, and Brussels) and in the U.S. occurred in conjunction with establishing offices in New York, Washington DC and Chicago. Throughout the post-bubble decline in IT capital spending that challenged the software industry, CAST continued to invest in product development and R&D. In 2005, CAST launched the Application Intelligence Platform, with great success in Europe and very promising signs of market traction in the U.S.
2006 – 2010: Profitable growth. In 2007, CAST posted impressive results with software revenue growth of 41% in Europe and 39% in the U.S., where new license sales jumped by 78%. This was followed by some difficult years in 2008 and 2009 due to the faltering economy. However, while many other enterprise software companies saw dramatic reduction in revenue during the economic crisis, or simply disappeared, CAST software sales decreased only by a modest 5%. By 2010, license revenues increased at a rapid pace, with many seven-figure investments in CAST made by large, global institutions. The company ended a strong 2010 with total revenue of €31.5M ($44M*), representing a 15% revenue increase.
2011 – Onward: Market leadership and rapid, profitable growth. CAST is approaching the coming period with several strengths—a solid foundation, market leadership position, global field presence, proven revenue-growth model and high resiliency. Combined with the convergence of market forces and an inflection in demand for SAM, the CAST executive team envisions a 15+% CAGR during the 2011-2014 period, and a 40% CAGR in sales through Systems Integrators and VARs, with a steadily growing 10+% profit.
