New Era of Networks Inc announced yesterday that it had acquired Vie Systems Inc, a competitive enterprise application integration software house, on undisclosed terms. Neon has bought all the outstanding shares of the privately-held company, which employs 20 people at its Lyndhurst, New Jersey-based headquarters. Vie sells its flagship Copernicus applications integration tool primarily into financial services companies, a market in which Neon claims to be the leader. It also sells to the travel, transportation and retail markets.
Copernicus, which IBM Corp resells with its MQSeries messaging software, was an early entrant into the message oriented middleware market. Vie was founded in May 1997, when it acquired the rights to Copernicus from New Paradigm Software Corp (CI No 3,100). New Paradigm itself was a spin-off from financial software house Management Technologies Inc, which realized way back in 1994 that the messaging translation software it was sitting on could be applied beyond the financial markets (CI No 2,365).
Vie holds the rights for what it claims was the first patent won by a corporation in the application integration field for Copernicus. It covers two main areas: constructing a late- binding translation program configured by data in a database; and the extension of the resulting translations into functions. Neon said it was aware of the patents held by Vie, and that it was always interested in holding patents. It says it hasn’t yet worked out how the Copernicus technology will fit in with its own, but says it acquired Vie for the technology, expertise and market position. Vie will be folded into Neon’s operations, but the New Jersey office will be retained. Vie CEO Eric LeGoff and other staff will stay on at Neon.
Earlier this year, Neon acquired ERP consultant D&M Ltd in Hong Kong to leverage its way into the Asia/Pacific region. In October last year it spent $41m on EAI firm Century Analysis Inc (CI No 3,508). And also last year it bought UK companies MSB Consultants and Menhir Ltd to speed up it expansion into Europe.
