The acquisition by privately-held Providence, Rhode Island-based Cadre Technologies Inc of Westmount Technology BV of Delft in The Netherlands officially took place last Thursday. There will be no job losses as a result, the two companies said. Westmount is looking to gain US exposure for its integrated software engineering tools, while Cadre wants to increase its European presence. Cadre considered a number of potential partners and chose Westmount because it had a strong European presence to build on. Westmount has 300 customers worldwide and more than 2,000 users. It refused to admit that this was effectively a takeover of Westmount by Cadre, although Cadre is acquiring the assets of Westmount and the Westmount name will fade out over the next 12 to 18 months. Cadre said that financially it could look as if it was taking over Westmount because Cadre’s turnover is $40m compared with just $5m for Westmount, but the two claim to have merged because their market share and products complement each other. They believe they can now offer a complete product suite – they have separated the market into technical and information systems, the latter being the real time-based mission critical systems. Westmount’s strengths lie in the information systems market and Cadre’s are in the technology systems market. In terms of future strategy, Westmount’s president and chief executive Weil van de Berg said if Windows95 is out in August the company will release a native Windows95 client in combination with Unix or OpenVMS server. In the first quarter of next year it will also use Windows NT on the server if it considers NT to be stable. We are not confident that NT is stable now. We will wait until it is more stable to protect ourselves, he said. At the moment it recognises instabilities on c ertain applications programming interfaces within the Windows environment itself, it said. But it said it will wait until customers are using it before it makes products to work under other operating systems. Cadre employs 300 people worldwide and Westmount has a total of 75 staff.
