By William Fellows
Continuing to spend its way to the top of the EAI pile, New Era of Networks Inc has picked up batch update and PeopleSoft application integration specialist Convoy Corp in a stock swap valued at $42m. Neon claims to have identified 75 technologies that a company needs if it wants to provide a full set of EAI services – plus packaged software products – and says it has got good coverage. It declined to specify just how many of these technologies it has under its belt now.
Having bought itself SAP and PeopleSoft expertise and created a unit to sell to telcos, Neon says it is still looking to establish other beachheads into CRM, business intelligence, supply chain and e-business markets. Neon claims it is already doing EAI over IP and says that to date it has had just one or two customer requests for implementing any of its suite using Microsoft’s MSMQ messaging protocol. Neon says it products can work over MSMQ. It also sounds like the company has got some more formal statement of its MSMQ intent brewing; it told us to wait a couple of weeks for more news on the matter.
Convoy claims to have done $10.4m revenue in its year to March 31 compared with $4.2m in the previous year. It got 80% from software sales, 20% from services. 30% of its customer base is in higher education; 20% in financial services. Its Convoy/DM products automate data migration, extract metadata and generate SQR data conversion programs automatically enabling data from third party and legacy applications to flow into and out of PeopleSoft applications. Like the rest of the Neon product suite, Convoy uses IBM MQSeries messaging protocols. All Convoy employees will be retained. CEDO John Valencia becomes Neon SVP.
Neon says there’s little overlap between product lines although Convoy’s PeopleSoft connections and adapter are more robust than its own, which will be folded in. Convoy’s embryonic work on SAP integration will no doubt be rolled into its SLI International acquisition’s technology.
