One of the country’s leading business intelligence software companies, Harvey Jones, has been forced into a dramatic restructuring after its UK parent, London-listed Avisen, refocused its business.

It’s understood that Harvey Jones, which had employed about 30 people, has been forced to reduce its headcount dramatically. Now MD Keith Jones is leading a management buyout of the local company but he says he is unable to comment until the deal is wrapped up, probably sometime next week.

Jones and his team at Harvey Jones engineered the listing of Avisen on the London Stock Exchange’s Aim market. The local company effectively reversed into Avisen.

In a stock exchange statement, Avisen earlier this month announced it had “agreed terms for the transfer of its entire interest” in its SA subsidiary to Jones.

It’s not clear how the restructuring will affect Harvey Jones’s 100-odd local business customers.

The decision to sell the local business follows Avisen’s April merger with the UK’s XploITe in an £11m deal. The merged entity has since decided to focus its energies on the British market.

A source close to Harvey Jones says the problems for the company began when Microsoft bought ProClarity in 2006 and then stopped developing its PerformancePoint performance management software.

The company’s strategy had become closely aligned with the Microsoft technology set and the US software maker’s decision to stop developing PerformancePoint was a big blow from which Harvey Jones wasn’t able to recover. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral