Things were a little touch-and-go for a while at Seattle-based UX design company Blue Rooster, but company founder Kevin Conroy says everything seems to have worked out in the end.
The company just sold its primary product, called Rise Foundation, to St. Louis-based IT consulting firm Perficient for an undisclosed sum. But what has Conroy really happy is that virtually the entire team will be staying on after the acquisition.
He acknowledged that the sale is a little bittersweet. But he said it’s overall a happy ending. “It’s a nice exit for Blue Rooster, the people, the product,” he said.
Blue Rooster is a 15-year-old company that offered on-premises IT solutions for Microsoft’s platforms the old-fashioned way for more than a decade. It had grown into a roughly 65-person company by 2013, but Conroy said that’s when they could feel the business going soft as its customers increasingly moved to the cloud and “what we did for a living was going away.”
So Blue Rooster made a pivot. After bootstrapping the business since he founded it, Conroy raised $3 million from PFU Limited and threw the entire weight of the company behind developing a cloud-based application that it calls “intranet in a box.” The software, named Rise Foundation, essentially lets businesses deploy a user-friendly interface on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint platform.
That product launched last year, and has now been sold, essentially acting as a life preserver for the company and its investors.
Perficient didn’t acquire the Blue Rooster company or brand, so Conroy isn’t sure yet what will happen with that. But he and the Blue Rooster team, which shrank to 16 employees by the time of the acquisition, will be moving over to Perficient with the product.
