Duane Presti: The Passing of an FP&A Legend

Duane E. Presti, CEO of PARIS Technologies International, Inc., was in the business of addressing management needs for better planning, analysis and reporting software solutions for over 40 years. Tragically, he died last month, age 69, as the result a vehicle accident in Bermuda while on vacation with his wife.

For the past several years Presti used the term Visionary Intelligence to describe PARIS’s software solution offerings.

Visionary Intelligence is a concept that both embraces and goes beyond standard Business Intelligence, to include all manner of plan-modeling: budget/forecast plans, initiative planning, etc. In the end, perhaps his greatest achievement was to help the everyday Excel user, who may still be struggling mightily to provide top management with the knowledge needed to lead businesses toward future success.

Presti graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with an undergraduate degree in Accounting and began his career at Bristol Myers. While still a junior staff member, he took up a challenge to oversee one of the first installations of PCs for use by financial analysts. This led to the adoption of a then-new software that revolutionized how users could work with financial data—the software we know today as the spreadsheet.  

[Anecdote: he liked to relate how he boldly told his boss, “you’ll see, within a year everyone will have a personal computer on his desk.” His boss said, “Are you willing to bet on that?” Duane took up the bet. His boss said, “you might have considered that more carefully, since I control the budget for those kinds of purchases.”]

During the next few years at Squibb, Presti experienced the limitations of standard relational database applications on the one hand, and end-user tools (including the spreadsheet) on the other.

[Anecdote: “Once we had converted our paper-based processes (!) to using this amazing software [spreadsheets], my colleagues and I were given a significant bonus, which was a very rare thing for the Accounting Dept. I was a ‘hero’! But then, after a year or so had passed, management—which had come to expect much, much faster response times from us—wanted even faster reporting and such…and I found that the spreadsheet system I had implemented was beginning to slow us down! I did a forensic analysis of a set of input plan numbers…and followed those numbers through hundreds and hundreds of spreadsheets, which took 10 days or more to work up into something we gave to management. The system I set up had started to be viewed as something of a disappointment to the CFO and his staff!”]

After determining that the problem was not going to be solved with a traditional transactional technology, he began to research early-stage analytical/multidimensional database products. His first-choice product entailed licensing costs and hardware requirements that would require more than a $5 million investment, as well as significant reoccurring operating costs. Instead, he went with a product development by a 3-person firm, who would operate under his direction to implement one of the first OLAP (online analytical processing) systems for financial planning that used multidimensional, multi-user spreadsheet software as its core.

Striking out on his own, in 1987 Presti founded his first software solution company, United Information Technologies Inc. (UIT). For ten years UIT developed enterprise financial planning systems for larger multinational corporations by using other software vendors’ products. Presti consulted with leading firms like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP on the need to develop and market software solutions that would lower the total cost of ownership to firms as well as provide hands-on control of solutions by end users—people who often spent their days “clerking Excel spreadsheets.”

In 1997 Presti founded the software developer PARIS Technologies, Inc., to create

“from the ground up a product that would embody the features and benefits the market demands, as well as overcome limitations of other products.”

PARIS was also motivated to introduce solutions with Fortune 1000 capabilities, but which could also be adopted quickly by middle-market or even smaller firms that had no exposure to such technologies.

As of 2023, the basis of PARIS’s solutions is PowerExcel—an Excel add-in that reaches a collaboration business-modeling environment known as Olation (a combination of OLAP and relational database technologies). PowerExcel can accommodate 100s of users for complex planning, analytics and reporting requirements; that said, its ease-of-use and price point make it attractive even to smaller workgroups, whether in Finance, Sales, Operations, etc. Excel, of course, is a native interface, but so are essentially all other front-end tools, making it truly a “nexus” Business Intelligence solution. 

Through the years, Presti’s software solutions have been implemented around the world at businesses of all sizes and in numerous industries. PARIS is indeed an international firm, with offices in the US, the Philippines, Australia and South Africa—and partnerships with firms in many other countries.

 Duane Presti was indeed a visionary developer and business leader, taking into account users’ and companies’ needs in the ever-changing world of OLAP/relational databases, spreadsheets, business intelligence products, internet/Cloud and other technologies.

 As one partner commented,

“it was as though he was there from the Wright Brothers’ first flight all the way to the moon landing—a long way for a guy who graduated with an accounting degree to have traveled. And you know those accountants are mostly not the types to take such risks!”