Image: Daegis
Daegis Inc. CEO Todd Wille is resigning in February and will be temporarily replaced by executive chairman Timothy Bacci, officials said Tuesday.
Daegis declined to make Wille or Bacci available for interviews, deferring to Deborah Jillson, president of e-discovery at the Roseville, Calif.-based software and services company. Jillson, who joined in May 2012 and has pushed for delivering software as a service rather than traditional applications, said she's a candidate for the job but that Daegis will also interview others during the next four to six months.
Wille, who Jillson said left for personal reasons, had an up-and-down ride during his 12 years leading Daegis and its predecessor Unify Corp. He oversaw several mergers and acquisitions, but more recently experienced two years of declining quarterly revenues and inconsistent profits and losses. Daegis did see modest growth in its revenue and profit for its second quarter of 2013.
"We've adjusted our model over the last couple of years and it's really stabled off," Jillson said.
Jillson, meanwhile, brought out a Daegis predictive coding product and trimmed staff. The company's client base is 65 percent corporations and 35 percent law firms, and is now starting to enter government sales, she said. Daegis recently announced the federal Transportation Security Administration as a customer, along with a second, unspecified federal agency — "It deals with money," she said.
Also in the Daegis plan is an increased focus on their software's performance in handling large amounts of data. Daegis is using Hadoop, which is an open-source program also used by e-discovery players such as EMC Corp. and LexisNexis, and by open-source e-discovery startup company SHMsoft.
Greg Buckles, a consultant at eDJ Group, said legal departments and law firms should expect to see more such shuffles in 2013 — but that it's a sign of industry maturity, not a reason to worry.
"What it immediately tells me is that this is an evolving market right now, with all the [merger and acquisition] activity, and we are seeing a lot of the historic market leaders struggle to redfine their business model," Buckles said. "I wouldn't see this, or any of the other changes going on within the industry, to be a reason why someone would look at it and take someone off their request for proposal list."
Evan Koblentz is a reporter for Law Technology News. Send email or follow him on Twitter.
