FTP Software Inc went on a buying spree last year, but it’s been downhill all the way since then. Now the company is offloading the assets of one of the companies it acquired then for $15m (CI No 2,896), Campbell Services Inc, developer of the OnTime client server group scheduling program. The buyer is Open Text Corp, the Waterloo, Canada-based document management company whose main product line is the Livelink tool for intranets, which is paying a knock down $6.7m in cash for the software. The OnTime tool had about a million users at the time of the acquisition, but FTP lost interest shortly after the acquisition was made, and decided to concentrate on it core communications business. Open Text will support OnTime customers and enhance the product, it said, providing tight integration between Livelink and OnTime. The combination will boost Open Text’s staff up to 400, and its revenues for the last four quarters of $34m. Andover, Massachusetts-based FTP fired 300 of its staff back in July, almost 40% of its workforce (CI No 3,207). In October it reported a third quarter loss of $29.6m on revenues down 36% to $14.2m.
