Boole and Babbage Inc, rated by Gartner Group as the leader in end-to-end automation and availability management software with its Command/Post portfolio, has reported record third-quarter figures. Revenues are up 7% to $48.8m and net income was $6.6m, a 113% jump on last time. Boole completed the acquisition of clever little software management company, Maxm Corp, in January for $25m in shares (CI No 3,082) and an associated one-off $11.3m hit shows up in the nine-month figures. Income for the nine months fell by 27% to $6.2m on revenues up by 9.5% to $145m. Without the one-time charge, per share earnings would have grown by 68% to $0.74. Some observers implied that Boole was buying market share through the Maxm acquisition and that there was little prospect of it enhancing the product line, but the company confounded their expectations by launching new systems only 90 days after the acquisition was complete, and by extending the scope of the Max/Enterprise systems management environment to encompass 15 flavors of Unix plus other client/server environments (CI 3,155) . Before the impact of currency rates and the Maxm acquisition, the San Jose, California-based company grew by 25% internationally and by 33% domestically. Mainframe revenues grew by 20% and client-server revenues grew by 56%. Even with the acquisition impact, client-server revenue was at record levels, accounting for 32% of the total. The company has now paid off its obligations to IBM Corp for the CICSPlex royalty stream, and says this releases more funds for development of new projects.
