Business Objects continues to broaden its offerings, in this case into the area of text search by buying Inxight , a company that was founded in 1997 based on research at Xerox Parc, and steadly built up an impressive customer list, partly through OEM arrangements. Its technology competes with Autonomy, Clear Forest and Stratify, and is strong in the area of multi-language support. The company had struggled somewhat in terms of market momentum, especially given the very hefty venture capital financing that it received (it was up to a $22M Series D round by 2002, following $29M of funds in 2001). Although its numbers are not public (and the purchase price is unclear at this point), it seems unlikely that it was yet profitable. Business Objects strong balance sheet provides a sensible home for the technology, and Business Objects’ very capable sales and marketing is a good match for a company with strong technology which has not executed that well in these areas. Text search is certainly an important and growing area in these days of increased regulation, and this adds a useful additional arrow to the Business Objects technology quiver.
2 comments so far
Hi Andy
I was on the board of Inxight for a few years and indeed the company suffered from the downturn in BI software in 2001-2002 but it had in recent years achieved significant traction with government in the US and in particular Homeland Security and hence decent revenue growth. What’s significant about the company is the breadth of its linguistics platform (from its PARC background and as an OEM vendor to the likes of SAS or ClearForest) and breadth of patents, on the back of which it built the information extraction platform that it sells to large enterprise and government. Like many companies in the space it never achieved hypergrowth as the proposition is inherently hard to sell in a purely packaged way, but it’s certainly the key player in this particular field. I haven’t been in touch with the business for a few years, but i’ll bet it’s profitable.
Thanks for the additional background Fred; I defer to your deeper knowledge. The rumour I heard was that Business Objects paid around USD 50M for a company doing USD 25M revenue with 120 staff, so I assumed that it wasn’t exactly a profit machine, but this purchase price estimate is speculation.
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