Verity Inc. and Inktomi Corp. jointly announced that they have entered into an agreement under which Verity will acquire from Inktomi the assets relating to Inktomi’s enterprise search software business, which includes basic search, categorization and content refinement capabilities, as well as its XML technology assets. Verity will pay a purchase price of $25 million in cash, and will also assume Inktomi’s obligations under certain existing enterprise search business contracts, including customer support obligations. The companies currently anticipate closing the transaction in the next 30 to 60 days, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Verity anticipates the transaction will be accretive to earnings per share within the first six months following closing. Under the terms of the parties’ agreement, Verity will gain access to Inktomi’s customer base of 2,500 companies worldwide. www.inktomi.com, www.verity.com
Month: November 2002 (Page 3 of 5)
Fidelio Acquisition Company, LLC, a company formed by Sony Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics and certain other investors, has executed a definitive agreement to acquire InterTrust Technologies Corporation. As a result of the transaction, Fidelio will acquire all of the outstanding common stock of InterTrust for approximately $453 million on a fully diluted basis or $4.25 per share. InterTrust’s Board of Directors has unanimously approved the acquisition. All InterTrust board members owning shares have agreed to tender all their shares of InterTrust common stock, representing approximately 20% of the outstanding common stock, in favor of the transaction. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2003. www.sony.com/SCA/index.html, www.philips.com/newscenter
LightSpeed Software, Inc. announced that it has partnered with Entopia, Inc. to provide a classification engine that works with its Knowledge Builder tool. Entopia incorporated LightSpeed’s pre-classification engine in the Knowledge Builder in conjunction with its own development of a configurable document classification tool that enables users to customize the classification and taxonomy. The Knowledge Builder is coupled with Entopia Quantum to facilitate integration of legacy content by generating a taxonomy and extracting metadata from source documents and integrating them into Entopia Quantum, where they are searchable and part of the collaboration space. The LightSpeed Software classifier engine comes with a knowledge base of about a million topics or themes. LightSpeed uses its classification technology in its own suite of Business Information tools and licenses the software both OEMs and VARs. www.LSpeed.com, www.entopia.com
The World Wide Web Consortium announced the release of the XForms 1.0 Candidate Recommendation. XForms 1.0 is the foundation for next-generation Web-based forms, by combining the ability to separate purpose, presentation, and results with the XML. Advancement of this document to Candidate Recommendation is a statement that the specification is stable. The W3C XForms Working Group invites the Web development community at large to implement the specification and demonstrate interoperability. In contrast to HTML Forms, with functional and presentation markup intertwined, XForms lets forms authors distinguish the descriptions of the purpose of the form; the presentation of the form, and how the results (the instance data) are written in XML. By splitting traditional HTML forms into three parts — XForms model, instance data, and the XForms user interface — it cleanly separates presentation from content. Practically speaking, XForms technologies make it possible to use forms from a PDA, a cell phone, screen reader or conventional desktop machine – without loss of functionality for the end user. XForms, while initially designed to be integrated into XHTML, may be adopted by any suitable markup language, such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). www.w3.org
eXcelon Corporation announced the availability of XIS Lite, a fully functional version of the company’s native XML database management system, eXtensible Information Server (XIS). XIS Lite is designed to enable customers with less extensive data requirements to achieve dynamic, extensible and reliable data management at a lower cost of ownership. eXcelon developed XIS Lite for companies that are using XML business documents to build the foundation for web services applications and standards-based integration networks where resilience to change is required. XIS Lite provides additional ROI to developers and architects who deploy applications on XIS Lite by providing them with the ability to re-deploy those applications on full-scale XIS without requiring modifications to application-level code. XIS Lite is available immediately starting at $995 per developer seat. www.exln.com
Venetica announced support for Oracle9i Application Server. Venetica’s product VeniceBridge will enable global customers to take advantage of the scalability and performance of Oracle9i Application Server when integrating portals, CRM solutions and other key applications with content distributed throughout the enterprise. www.venetica.com
Documentum announced the immediate availability of Content Services for EMC Centera, an archiving solution based on the completed integration between the Documentum ECM platform and the EMC Centera Content Addressed Storage (CAS) solution. EMC Centera is an online storage system that ensures the authenticity and immutability of enterprise content. Content Services for EMC Centera provides a complete, optimized solution for archiving large volumes of content across an entire enterprise, by linking Documentum 5 (or 4i) with EMC Centera. EMC Centera is an online storage architecture specifically designed to address the unique storage requirements of fixed content, such as photos, videos, audio, graphics and web content. Content Services for EMC Centera enables customers to automate their business policies to securely deposit, archive and access any type of content asset in EMC Centera. www.emc.com, www.documentum.com
Pindar Systems announced the launch of Agility 2, adding new enterprise platform and application support, Java and Web ease-of-use features, and workflow/functionality enhancements to its multi-channel content management platform. New workflow enhancements include event-triggering on workflow state changes, auto-advance of ‘child’ states, defined ‘next states’, and extended auto-transition rules. New features include check-in and check-out for documents and digital media assets, new capabilities for automating the creation of complex tables, and automated Enterprise Java Beans functionality. Agility supports Adobe InDesign 2.0 and QuarkXpress. IBM’s WebSphere and BEA’s WebLogic application servers are supported as well as IBM’s DB2, Oracle 9i and MS SQL Server 2000. Agility 2.0 now runs on the UNIX AIX/Solaris platforms in addition to Microsoft Windows 2000. Agility 2’s object-based EDGE data management technology allows users to link objects, the basic building blocks of the data structure, into an infinite variety of taxonomies. Each object can include an unlimited number of attributes. Agility 2 will be available commercially in early January 2003. www.pindarsystems.com
