Media-based business intelligence software firm Altosoft acquired for $13.5 million

Tom Paine

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Kofax, plc, which is headquartered in Irvine, CA, though it is listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: KFX), announced on Friday it had acquired Media-based Altosoft for $13.5 million in cash plus additional possible payments depending upon performance.

Altosoft provides business intelligence software focused on Business Process Management (BPM) applications, with a particular strength in healthcare. Altosoft's software "provides rapid, no-coding development of near real time reporting and dashboard applications through the use of a data integration and analytics engine utilizing in-memory techniques," Kofax said in its release. "The software is available for both traditional on-premise deployments and as a hosted SaaS subscription offering featuring multi-tenant capabilities." Kofax emphasized that the major reason for its acquiring Altosoft was to deliver informstion to its customers faster.

Altosoft co-founders Alex Elkin and Scott Opitz will remain with Kofax, the company said. For 2012, Altosoft reported revenues of $3.4 million and an EBITA of $0.5 million, according to Kofax. Altosoft has approximately 43 employees mostly located in the US and Russia. Ben Franklin Technology Partners SEP was an early investor in Altosoft, which was founded in 2001. This Kofax FAQ (pdf) provides more background information on Altosoft and how it will fit with Kofax.

Kofax describes itself as a "leading provider of Capture Enabled BPM solutions." It reported $262.5 million in revenue for its fiscal year ending June 30, 2012.




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Philly Tech People News 3/3/2013

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COMCAST WASHINGTON, D.C. OFFICE ANNOUNCES NEW LEGAL AND PUBLIC POLICY HIRES (Comcast Press Release)

Welcome Aboard! Matt Schwartz and Katelyn Ares Join PeopleLinx (PeopleLinx Blog)

AMETEK Names Tom Marecic as Senior Vice President and General Manager - Electronic Instruments Group (PR Newswire)

A Fond Farewell (Wharton Entrepreneurship Blog)




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Comcast Says NBCU Is Negotiating 'Full Freight' Internet TV Deals
Media company in talks with several online video distributors, according to MSO's report to FCC (Multichannel News)

Angelakis: Retrans a $200M Business for NBC by 2014
Comcast CFO expects retrans take to rise five-fold from 2012 (Broadcasting & Cable)

Sources: NBC Discussing Jay Leno Exit Plan (Hollywood Reporter)

With QVC's 2012 results, looking back and ahead (Philadelphia Inquirer)

News Corp., Disney Said Discussing Control of Hulu Site (Bloomberg)
Comcast would keep its silent minority stake, report says.

Lockheed Martin powers on the first GPS III satellite (Phys.org)

ThingWorx completes $8 million Series C

Tom Paine

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Exton-based "Internet of Things" M2M application platform startup ThingWorx has apparently completed a
Series C round first announced in October, according to an updated SEC filing appearing on FormDs.com. The new filing shows that ThingWorx has raised $8 million (well, actually $7,999,977), up from about $5.4 million reported for the round in October.

ThingWorx previously raised a $5 million Series B in early 2011, bringing its total funding raised to date to at least $13 million. Both the Series B and Series C were lead by Safeguard Scientifics.

ThingWorx has developed a number of customer relationships to extend its M2M application platform into different vertical industrial markets.

Daily Links 3/1/2013: Comcast tells FCC its overdelivered on NBC pledges

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Salesforce.com Caps Record Year, Eyes Acquisitions (Information Week)
Would Salesforce try to buy Marketo, which is apparently moving closer to an IPO? It would be expensive.

Salesforce Shares Reach All-Time High As Stock Pops 7.2% In Wake Of Favorable Earnings (TechCrunch)

Internal document suggests SAP's goal of simplifying licensing will be a tall order
SAP still requires 131 pages of fine print to describe software licensing rules for its products (Infoworld)

Savvis launches hosting service for SAP's new hit database software
(St. Louis Business Journal)

Lockheed sees material effect of budget cuts on sales, earnings
(Reuters)

Comcast to FCC: We've Overdelivered on NBC Promises
Files Second-Year Status Report on Voluntary Deal Conditions (Multichannel News)

CoreDial Announces Record Growth For 2012 (CoreDial Website)



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Today in Philly Tech History 3/1/2001; Bala Cynwyd-based Digital Access Inc., after blowing through $450 million, shuts down

On March 1, 2001, Bala Cynwyd-based Digital Access Inc., having spent $450 million trying to build a broadband competitor to companies such as Comcast, announced it could not raise more needed cash and was shutting down. It was trying to raise another $900 million in debt to finance its buildout, but couldn't find it in the environment that followed the Internet bubble meltdown.

Digital Access was planning to enter the Indianapolis, Kansas City and Milwaukee markets. It cited market conditions, as well as regulatory delays that slowed down it down, as major factors, but in fact the opportunity for major independent residential broadband competitors to the established cable operators to get off the ground was coming to an end. Investors in Digital Access included Goldman Sachs, Navis Partners and Bachow & Associates.



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Daily Links 2/28/2013: VMware exec: "Hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books"

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EPAM Systems Reports Record Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012 (Thomson Reuters One via Yahoo Finance)

Universal Display rides higher on hopes of OLED TV ramp
Organic LED materials specialist reports 'best ever' financial year, and is excited by investments at LG and Samsung. (Optics.org)


COMCAST LAUNCHES COPYRIGHT ALERT SYSTEM (Comcast Voices/Official Comcast Blog)

Cablevision to Suspend Repeat Copyright Scofflaws, Comcast to Hijack Browsers (Wired)

Cablevision Declines After Sandy Damage Leads to Quarterly Loss (Bloomberg)

Salesforce Forecast Tops Estimates on New Product Demand (Bloomberg)

With 23 million weekly listeners, digital radio platform Jelli partners with Entercom to supercharge distribution (PandoDaily)
Entercom is based in Bala Cynwyd; First Round Capital was an early investor in Jelli.

Liberty Media 4Q revenue, profits fall (AP via Businessweek)
52% revenue decline from last year attributed to deferred revenue recognized last year by
Berwyn-based TruePosition from huge telco contract.

VMware Top Execs Lash Out At Amazon Public Cloud (CRN)
"I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books", VMware President/COO tells partners conference.

Disruption guru Clay Christensen says incumbent media players are making a classic mistake (paidContent)




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451 Group research note on Dell Boomi has some interesting info

Tom Paine

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The 451 Group, a software industry research group, has published a research note on Berwyn-based Dell Boomi (pdf) republished with permission on Boomi's website.

The report describes Dell Boomi as "a strong thought leader in the hybrid cloud-integration market. Its AtomSphere platform, Atom integration componentry and design capabilities such as its Suggest feature make it a desirable tool for integration designers and administrators alike." It cites Boomi's recently announced one million cloud-managed integration processes per day milestone "as a wakeup call for systems integrators, cloud hosts and all manner of integration technology and services
rivals to step up their efforts to enhance hybrid integration architecture as part of datacenter and cloud operating environments." The 451 Group also mentions Dell Boomi's recently announced partnership with Wipro, in addition to a similar partnership announced last year with Infosys, as being important steps forward with the systems integrator community.

I knew Boomi was still rather small when it was acquired by Dell in 2010, but The 451 Group's estimate of $5 million in revenue at that time (if accurate) suggests it was even smaller than I thought. It estimates the acquisition price (never disclosed by Dell publicly) at about $60 million and projects that Boomi will contribute $20 to $25 million in revenue to Dell in 2013.

The 451 Group sees Informatica, closely followed by MuleSoft, Jitterbit and IBM Cast Iron, and on occasion, SnapLogic, as its closest competitors, while middleware offerings from Tibco, Pervasive, IBM (WebSphere), Oracle (Fusion) and SAP (NetWeaver) remain factors. The report concludes that perhaps the greatest competitive threat to Dell Boomi comes from the open source community.

An anticipated upcoming product from Boomi will be the formal unveiling of its cloud-based MDM (Master Data Management) suite offering enhanced tools for modeling, storing, synchronizing, validating and cleansing master data, The 451 Group says.

Dell Boomi was cofounded by its current GM, Rick Nucci. Former CEO Bob Moul left a year after the acquisition and now is CEO of Philly mobile platform startup Artisan, as well as President of Philly Startup Leaders.

Daily Links 2/27/2013: Monetate raises another $15 million

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Monetate of Conshohocken raises $15M (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Gov. Christie signs internet gambling into law (NJ.com)

Intel, SAP Make Big Data Play Behind Hadoop (CRN)

Salesforce.com Expected To Beat Q4 Earnings Estimates (Investor's Business Daily)

Liberty Interactive Corporation Reports Fourth Quarter and Year End 2012 Financial Results (Business Wire)
Consolidated QVC revenue grew by 2%; says QVC is the second largest mobile commerce multi-category retailer in 2012, behind only Amazon, according to Internet Retailer.

Universal Display Posts Mixed Q4; Shares Gain After Hours
(Forbes)


Bucks to launch $4 million venture capital fund for local business (phillyBurbs.com)

UPenn robots spring into action, save wooden hero (video) (Engadget)

Cablevision-Viacom battle echoes Malone-Redstone fight (LA Times: Company Town)




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Daily Links 2/26/2013: SAP and Ericsson join forces on M2M services

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SAP adds to supply-chain tech with SmartOps acquisition
SAP plans to tie SmartOps' technology to HANA (Infoworld)

SAP and Ericsson join forces on M2M services (Network World)

SAP Transitioning To Cloud And Other Growth Areas (Investor's Business Daily)
Q&A with SAP CTO Vishal Sikka.

SAP Shifts 5,000 Direct Accounts To Channel Partners (CRN)


InterDigital and SemperCon Launch CirrusCon, Cloud-Based Platform for Mobile Application Bandwidth Control, Connectivity Management (Business Wire)

Philadelphia: Give Sharing a Chance (Sidecar Blog)

Oracle: Eloqua Will Stay Friendly With Salesforce.com (Information Week)

Salesforce unveils 'customer company' mantra: Can it deliver? (ZDNet)

Verizon's Shammo: 50 Mbps is FiOS' sweet speed spot
Reaffirms copper-to-fiber transition initiative (FierceTelecom)

Comcast's 'X2' to Get Personal With the TV (Light Reading Cable)

Maybe You’ll Get the Pay TV You Want, After All: Cablevision Sues Viacom to Break Up the Bundle (All Things D)

Comcast Business, Baltimore Tech Park partner (CED Magazine)




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