One year ago, Banyan Systems Inc invested $500,000 in Beyond Inc as part of the Burlington, Massachusetts company’s third round of venture financing, but said it didn’t intend to market Beyond products. Yesterday, the Westborough, Massachusetts company announced that it had defintive agreement to buy the company for $17.5m in cash and other liabilities, and warned that it would likely have to take an $11m hit against profits on the acquisition. Banyan says the acquisition will enable it to extend its enterprise network services with messaging-enabled systems for the enterprise networking market. Banyan’s StreetTalk global directory, Intelligent Messaging infrastructure, coupled with the highly customisable environment provided by Beyond Mail delivers a flexible system for deployment of applications and data across corporate networksm it says. It will integrate Beyond’s rules technology into its messaging service to create messaging-enabled products for mobile computing professionals and says that the resulting system will offer a level of openness, so that other popular mail systems such as Microsoft Mail and cc:Mail workgroup packages will be integratable into the enterprise environment.
