Entries Tagged 'M&A' ↓

Covering the the complex event specialists just got 25% easier. We noted in September last year that the complex event processing (CEP) specialists StreamBase Systems, Aleri and Coral8 were attractive acquisition targets and that it would only be a matter of time before we saw consolidation in the event processing sector. Consolidation among those vendors wasn’t exactly what we had in mind, but that is what has come to pass as Aleri has announced the acquisition of Coral8 for an undisclosed fee.

The combined entity, which continues to use the Aleri name, is now claiming to be the largest CEP specialist on the market, although that is debatable and we expect it to be strongly debated by StreamBase and Progress Software’s Apama division.

Here are the numbers to be debated: All of Coral8’s 45 employees are joining Aleri, which will have a combined headcount of 95 and will boast 80 paying customers, less than five of which are existing customers of both companies.

We will have a full assessment of the deal and its implications out later today, but our first impressions are as follows:

While the acquisition of Coral8 by Aleri may appear at first glance like a combination of near-equals the resulting business stands to benefit from complementary product and sales strategies that should bring about cost savings via reduced duplication of effort and enable further expansion outside financial services.

CEP is becoming a core enabling technology for data processing and analysis and the new Aleri is well positioned to build on its established position in capital markets and exploit partnerships with business intelligence and data warehousing vendors for wider adoption

So it appears that John Markus Lervik has left Microsoft – he’s now a (Former) Corporate Vice President there, despite the fact that Microsoft claimed to be concentrating its search efforts in his native Norway.

When I saw the news over the weekend I took one look at the date and recalled that the deal to buy FAST was in early January 2008 and thus a year had just past and such 12 month lock-ups are customary, and that FASTForward09 is coming up, starting February 9 and so Microsoft wanted a clean break before that, I’m sure. Nobody’s talking right now, so it’s hard to know all the ins and outs, but that’s why I suspect it’s happened now, rather than earlier or later.

Anyway, I agree with Dave Kellog’s assessment of why what happened, happened.

John Markus never seemed comfortable to me being a Microsoft executive. Bjorn Olstad probably isn’t that comfortable with it either, but he is undoubtedly a very smart engineering leader and product developer, and in a role where he doesn’t need to sing the company song three times before breakfast and I suspect he’d like to stay that way, rather than get involved in being a figurehead for FAST within Microsoft.

We look forward to hearing just what Microsoft is doing with FAST in early February, because over the last year or so, we haven’t heard anything more than we heard at FASTForward last year.

Release is here. Autonomy is paying $775m cash, including a new loan.

Main drivers as we see it right now having just listened to the call:

• eDiscovery and increasingly regulated environment.
• Access to Interwoven’s rich customer base in the legal sector.
• Adding automation to the content management process – think auto-tagging rather than manual tagging.
• FRCP changes in 2006 forced companies to consider all their data and you can’ manage all your data manually.
• Autonomy has changed its mind about content management for the reasons above.
• Reward for Interwoven’s turnaround and refocusing efforts including in eDiscovery via the Discovery Mining acquisition.
• Leaves other standalone content management players in an even worse position (e.g. Vignette).
• Autonomy acquisition engine gets some more fuel; it’s looking more & more like a mini-Oracle every day, in all senses of that phrase.

More considered and deep analysis coming to 451 customers later today.