Micro Focus, IBM and Adobe are starting the new year with fresh acquisitions, with Micro Focus taking on software assets from Progress Software, IBM buying into the big data space again, and Adobe building out its creative cloud. The three deals were announced over the holiday period.
The Micro Focus move is the most interesting. It will pay $15m for the IP, assets and liabilities of Progress Software’s Orbix, Orbacus and Artix software lines. It gains c200 enterprise customers which it says overlap with its customer base and include larger multinationals across the telecommunications, financial services and government verticals. The deal is expected to close on January 21 and Micro Focus is anticipating it will contribute $4m in revenue in the period from completion to April 30 2013, and $14m in revenue in the year from May 2013. If all goes to plan is will be a boost for Micro Focus who has got the cost side of the business under control but is struggling to find growth (see Micro Focus: room for improvement). As for Progress Software, the move completes the sell-off of its designated non-core assets, ahead of plan (see Progress Software: radical lessons in ‘back to basics’). This could be a two-for-one revitalisation but of the two vendors there are more obvious upsides for Micro Focus.
Over at IBM, the company announced its intention to acquire privately-held information management company StoredIQ who focuses on the management and analysis of unstructured enterprise data with an emphasis on governance, secure data disposal and storage cost reductions for its c120 customers. It will become part of IBM’s Information Lifecycle Governance suite and will build on previous acquisitions like Vivisimo and PSS Systems (see here). Terms were not disclosed. While much of the market is looking at ways of managing and exploiting big data, StoredIQ also addresses the important task of identifying and removing the data that is of no use. Making that determination is not a trivial task but is necessary in order to make the most of the big data concept – big data can easily lead to a high level of garbage that slows performance and is costly to store.
The third notable acquisition was Adobe’s purchase of privately held 32-employee, New York-based Behance which was founded in 2006 and provides an online social portfolio platform that enables creative professionals to showcase their portfolio, and enterprises to search for talent. The company raised $6.5m in Series A funding in May 2011. Its product will integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud which is seeing faster than expected subscription growth (see Subscriptions accelerate at Adobe). Behance powers the portfolio features for many other sites so it will bring a new customer dimension to Adobe as well as helping round out the functionality of the Creative Cloud.