iPhrase Technologies, Inc. announced the acquisition of Banter Systems, Inc., a provider of automatic classification software used to understand unstructured content and informal communications. iPhrase acquired Banter in an all-stock transaction. The deal doubles the size of iPhrase’s engineering team. iPhrase acquired all of Banter’s technology assets, customers, partner relationships and employees, including Banter’s Israeli-based research and development team. The acquisition has closed and Banter’s integration into iPhrase is underway. iPhrase will maintain its current Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters. The unified company now has a position in both the enterprise search and e-Service enablement market. The acquisition allows iPhrase to extend its NLP support from web based interactions to e-mail, chat and secure messaging, adds automated classification capabilities, and extends its partner coverage from the Web Infrastructure segment into the CRM market. www.iphrase.com
Day: January 11, 2004
Cardiff Software Inc. and Relizon announced a strategic alliance to deliver business process automation solutions for Relizon’s customers. The integration of Cardiff’s eForm solutions with Relizon’s end-to-end business process design and management will provide productivity gains from the enterprise-wide document management process. The Relizon-Cardiff solution development will center on Cardiff’s LiquidOffice, a Web-based eForm automation solution for creating, deploying and automatically managing the routing, tracking and approval processes for electronic forms. LiquidOffice’s automation of internal and external forms helps organizations increase efficiency and productivity, while its use of XML, HTML and PDF ensure enterprise connectivity with database, ERP, accounting and back-office applications. www.relizon.com, www.cardiff.com
Adobe Systems Incorporated shipped Adobe FrameMaker 7.1 software, the upgrade to its enterprise authoring and publishing solution. Importing and migrating technical documents into FrameMaker 7.1 is now easier and faster. With the Conditional Text feature, authors can maintain different variations of a document in a single XML source file. The variations can be controlled and previewed for print and PDF, and can be utilized in XML transformations downstream. Users can also now manage cross-references between XML files. Both features provide greater flexibility in managing and delivering content in XML. Windows users can expand on previous projects by migrating technical documents created in Adobe PageMaker (versions 6.5-7.0) and QuarkXPress (versions 3.3-4.1) directly into FrameMaker 7.1. SVG can be used as a single source for publishing vector graphics in printed materials, Adobe PDF, or on the Web. FrameMaker 7.1 for Windows and Sun Solaris is now available in the United States, Europe and Canada. FrameMaker 7.1, desktop version, for Windows is US$799 for the full version and $199 for the upgrade. On Sun Solaris, the full version is $1,329 and $279 for the upgrade. For Macintosh users, FrameMaker 7.0 is still available for both Mac OS 9 and OS X Classic. www.adobe.com
Stellent, Inc. announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of Optika Inc. an enterprise content management (ECM) provider of imaging, business process management (BPM), collaboration and records management software, for $10 million in cash, approximately 4.1 million shares of Stellent common stock and the assumption by Stellent of Optika’s outstanding options. Based on Stellent’s stock price as of Jan. 9, 2004 and including the value of the options to be assumed, the transaction currently is valued at approximately $59 million. Immediately after the transaction, the former stockholders of Optika will own approximately 16 percent of the outstanding shares of Stellent common stock, and Stellent shareholders will own approximately 84 percent of the combined entity. The combined company will have an annual revenue run rate of approximately $100 million, and a cash and marketable securities position of approximately $70 million. Combined with Stellent’s Universal Content Management architecture, Optika’s product line will enable Stellent to provide customers with a suite of solutions to manage both collaborative, consumption-oriented content as well as content generated and circulated during complex business transactions. In the short-term, Stellent plans to integrate the product lines via Web services. Longer-term plans call for the product lines to be integrated utilizing Stellent’s universal content repository. www.stellent.com, www.optika.com
