EMC Corporation announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VMware, Inc. in a cash transaction valued at approximately $635 million. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and is expected to be completed early in the first quarter of 2004.
The acquisition of VMware will help customers deploy virtualization technologies across their heterogeneous IT infrastructure to create a single pool of available storage and computing resources. This “Virtual Information Infrastructure” will enable organizations to dynamically configure and reconfigure their compute and storage environments. EMC expects to take a charge of approximately $15 to $20 million in the first quarter of 2004 for the value of VMware’s in-process research and development costs and other integration expenses. EMC plans to operate VMware as a software subsidiary of EMC, headquartered in Palo Alto and led by Diane Greene, VMware’s current President and CEO. VMware will remain focused on developing, selling and servicing VMware’s products and solutions. www.vmware.com, www.EMC.com
Day: December 14, 2003
Hummingbird Ltd. announced a technology alliance with Ricoh Corporation. Hummingbird’s relationship with Ricoh extends Hummingbird Enterprise solutions to provide the ability to capture, manage and share scanned documents and photographic images across the enterprise, from multiple sources to a single repository. The Hummingbird and Ricoh technology alliance introduces two distinct applications: Ricoh GlobalScan document scanning software linked to the Hummingbird DM system; and a new geo-imaging solution integrating Hummingbird Enterprise for ESRI with the Ricoh GPS-enabled digital camera. Ricoh GlobalScan software, combined with Ricoh Aficio multi-function products (MFPs), can link to the Hummingbird DM system allowing users to scan and index documents into Hummingbird document management repositories directly from the touch-screen panel of the Ricoh Aficio MFPs. With Ricoh’s GlobalScan software architecture all information such as indexes, database information and file types are displayed and accessed easily through the Aficio MFPs front panel. www.ricoh-usa.com, www.hummingbird.com
Miller Systems and Percussion Software announced a partnership to offer customers expanded content management solutions. Miller Systems will offer implementation services for Percussion’s Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System to its clients with comprehensive content management requirements. Miller Systems’ partnership with Percussion will enable it to design, develop and deliver sophisticated content management solutions more easily for clients’ Web sites, intranets, extranets, and enterprise portals. www.percussion.com, www.millersystems.com
Plumtree Software and BackWeb Technologies announced that Plumtree will resell BackWeb’s Offline Access Server, giving mobile Enterprise Web users access to applications and content when those users are disconnected from the network. Plumtree will resell a Standard Edition of the BackWeb Offline Access Server with support for the entire Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite; this functionality extends offline access to the Plumtree Corporate Portal, Plumtree Content Server and Plumtree Collaboration Server, Microsoft Office integration portlets and portlets created using Plumtree Studio Server. Plumtree will also resell an Enterprise Edition of BackWeb’s Offline Access Server which includes the added capability to offline enable Plumtree’s Integration Products, custom portlets, and 3rd party portlets. Users of the offline features can subscribe to specific portlets, content or applications for offline access ensuring that only the selected content will be downloaded when the user logs off the network. BackWeb’s Offline Access Server is built to support the Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.5, 4.5WS and 5.0, Collaboration Server 3.0, Content Server 5.0, and Studio Server 2.0. www.backweb.com, www.plumtree.com
Groxis, Inc. announced general availability of Grokker 2, the latest generation of its visual search product. The new software can organize and visually map thousands of search results in a few seconds from multiple search engines and content sources simultaneously. This creates the opportunity to build Grokker plug-ins to any content source, database, or search engine on the net. The company expects to announce several new plug-ins in the coming months. Grokker 2 goes on sale today at a special price of $49, along with a 30-day free “Try and Buy” offer. Available on PCs today, Grokker 2 will be available for the Apple Mac OS X platform in Q1 2004. www.groxis.com
North Plains Systems Corp. announced that it has released the Integration Broker which provides the next generation of integration and web services for TeleScope Enterprise. TeleScope has an existing suite of integration tools which allow customers to share their data with other business systems, such as the XML Gateway. The Integration Broker, utilizing SOAP, is an extension to these integration capabilities. Concurrent with the release of the Integration Broker, North Plains Systems has initiated a technology partnership program enabling third-party technology suppliers to connect to the TeleScope framework or embed TeleScope’s DAM services within their application. North Plains Systems will offer its technology partnership to software vendors in such industries as e-Learning, Marketing Automation, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Content Management, and others. www.northplains.com
Network Appliance, Inc. and Documentum announced that they are extending their existing partnership. Specifically, the two companies will perform joint lab testing at Documentum to certify and support the Documentum ECM platform on NetApp platforms, and Documentum will join the NetApp Developer’s Program. The companies will also develop expanded go-to-market strategies, including collaborating to deliver total solutions to mutual customers. The combined solution provides fast access to both current and archived content, simplifies infrastructure management, and scales to a billion data objects while still supporting thousands of concurrent users. www.documentum.com, www.netapp.com
