There would more technical synergy in a buyout than might be readily apparent. Verity and the distributed search group at Lotus have common parentage and a short history of technical collaboration. The common parent of both was a company called ADS (Advanced Decision Systems), which spun out Verity 10 years ago. ADS was bought by Booz-Allen, where the group eventually developed Minerva, a distributed heterogeneous search architecture -- a consulting version of the kind of thing Lotus is saying it will deliver. Booz made some serious consulting dollars by building custom distributed search for the Chemical Manufacturers Association and others. But Booz doesn't have the structure to support product development and it sold Minerva to IBM a couple of years ago, where it became InfoMarket. Shortly after IBM's acquistion, Verity supported development of a software module that would allow the Verity engine to be hooked into the distributed search system. InfoMarket was to be a sort of middleman for selling digital information, but it was shut down a few months back... and the development team went to Lotus.
I leave it to the reader to guess what all that means in the current dispute. Like Don, I'm ex-Verity, but I know most of this history not from being at Verity, but because one of my closest friends, Dave Holtzman, was the head of Minerva and InfoMarket engineering. He is now sr vp of engineering at Network Solutions, which went public recently. Dave will speak at Internet World tomorrow -- see biz.yahoo.com. I'm eager to hear what he thinks about all this.
All that notwithstanding, my personal opinion is that this lawsuit is primarily a reflection of new discipline at Verity, in which there's no such thing as a strategic deal that doesn't stand on its own.
I'm skeptical as to whether we are anywhere near a price where the board would go along with a buyout.
Nick |
