San Francisco, California-based Macromedia said that Presidia’s software draws on its Flash technology to offer presentation and e-learning software in both a hosted and licensed manner. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Macromedia said it will add Presidia’s technology to its Macromedia Information Convenience product line-up. The company in November announced the first product in that range, Contribute, which is an application designed to permit non-technical business users with no HTML knowledge to create and make changes to web pages.
The software allows users to publish directly to a live server. It is compatible with Microsoft Office applications, allowing users to drag and drop documents into web pages and have Contribute convert them into HTML.
The company said that with Presidia’s flagship product, Express, it extends its range in the online presentation, training and e-learning market. The company also announced that it is working on a version of Express, which will enable the software to run on PDAs and wireless devices, as well as the internet-connected PCs which are currently supported.
Existing Express customers include Novell, Sprint and Wells Fargo. Like Contribute, Express is pitched at non-technical professionals wanting to use existing office productivity tools, in this case the likes of Microsoft PowerPoint. It enables them to annotate their presentations with audio, and combine these two elements into a streaming Macromedia Flash application delivered as hosted or licensed software.
At the time of writing the market had expressed little interest in Macromedia’s acquisition, and its stock was down 3% at $12.51.
For its third quarter ended September 30, Macromedia posted sales of $85.4m, compared with revenue of $87.1m in the same period a year earlier. Excluding restructuring and other charges, pro forma net income for the second quarter was $7.8m, compared to a pro forma net loss of $3.3m a year earlier. The net loss was $11.7m compared to a net loss of $70.7m for the third quarter 2001. At the time of its latest results announcement, Macromedia still had cash and cash equivalents of over $148m, which it is clearly not afraid to dip into if acquisition opportunities arise.
Source: Computerwire
