Allaire Corp announced the $20m acquisition of Bright Tiger Technologies Inc yesterday, while also revealing first quarter figures ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. Bright Tiger is a provider of web application scalability and management technology that Allaire already incorporates in its ColdFusion Enterprise 4.0 web application development suite.
Allaire is issuing around 300,000 shares for the acquisition, which based on yesterday’s closing price, values Bright Tiger at $17.0m. Allaire is also assuming $3m of Bright Tiger’s debt, which it will pay off immediately and it also expects to pay charges of $2.2m. The acquisition is being accounted for as a pooling of interests. Allaire CFO David Gerth says the expense of the acquisition will outstrip the savings the company gets from not having to pay Bright Tiger royalties by around $700,000 per quarter for the remainder of 1999. However, he is not revising his expectations for the rest of the year.
For the first quarter, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Allaire recorded net losses of $1.7m, down from $2.2m losses last year, on revenue that rose 94% to $7.8m. That translates into a loss per share of 19 cents, which is eight cents per share better than First Call’s average analyst estimate.
During the quarter Allaire added the likes of Autobytel, AutoWeb and Toys’R’Us as customers of its flagship ColdFusion product and now claims to have around 250,000 developers for its whole product line, which also includes the HomeSite web site design tool. It recruited around 200 consulting, training, hosting and resellers to its partner programs and says its average deal size is about $6,000. Around 54% of its revenues came from the channel, while 84% came from within the US.
The addition of Bright Tiger gives Allaire its ClusterCats load balancing and server failover technology that has featured in ColdFusion since 4.0 was introduced last fall. In the second half of this year, Allaire will introduce a framework of pre-built e- commerce application components that is being tested under the code name of Tempest. The components apparently include content management and personalization tools. Allaire says the product is in beta with about 200 testers right now. There will be a Japanese version of ColdFusion during the current quarter – one that Allaire says it feels confident about at this stage. Allaire went public in late January, erasing about $50m for the company. Its increase in cash and equivalents to $53.2m at the end of the quarter is due entirely to the IPO, says the company.
