Brio Technology

Brio Technology was a San Francisco Bay area software company cofounded in 1984 by Yorgen Edholm and Katherine Glassey. The company is best known for their business intelligence software systems, starting with DataPivot on the Apple Macintosh. Brio Software was acquired by Hyperion in 2003. Hyperion was in turn acquired by Oracle four years later, absorbing Brio into the Oracle Hyperion Performance Management applications.

History

Brio Technology was founded in San Francisco in 1984 as a consulting company. It made money early by doing contract work for Metaphor Corporation and performing contract programming.

Business intelligence software

By 1990, Brio had developed its first product, Data Prism, a database query and analysis tool.

The next year, Brio released Data Pivot, an innovative program designed to allow regular or sequenced data to be totaled automatically. This was one of the first OLAP software applications. The DataPivot code was later sold in the early 90's to Borland and integrated into Quattro Pro. The essential idea of DataPivot (pivot tables) was also added to Microsoft Excel a bit later. Also Lotus Improv was built around a similar (though independently created) idea. Brio gained a patent for the idea behind DataPivot ("Cross Tab Analysis and Reporting Method") in 1999.