SDL has now completed the acquisition of Alterian (see here for the background), paying £69.7m in cash, and Alterian shares have been taken off the stock exchange. Now the work begins to meld the two entities on a financial and product level.
On a conference call this morning to discuss the acquisition, SDL executive chairman Mark Lancaster said that unraveling Alterian’s numbers and identifying where its customer base is, has been a challenge in the light of Alterian’s financial restatements and restructuring.
His view is that Alterian’s web content management business was declining, although it has a nice maintenance stream and there is scope for some new licence sales. It will be wrapped into SDL’s content management solutions. SDL views Alterian’s marketing, analytics and campaign management (which is where the bulk of its revenue has been) plus its social media capabilities (small revenues but high growth potential) as the real points of value within the business and will continue to invest in them to the tune of £1m to £2m.
Lancaster tagged Alterian as a highly strategic acquisition and from the top level plans laid out this morning and ongoing investment in R&D clearly has big plans for the company. Alterian has a good set of technologies and is operating in some hot technology spaces but poor execution means it has never really been able to deliver on its potential, Hopefully that will change under SDL.