Bedford, Massachusetts-based Progress, which develops software tools for accelerating business applications deployment, says EasyAsk will function as a separate business division.
Founded in 1994 and heavily venture-based, Marlborough, Massachusetts-based EasyAsk develops software search and retrieval software used by B2B and B2C Web sites.
The company has around 120 customers including AnnTaylor, E-Loan, Forbes.com, Hewlett-Packard, Lands’ End and Siemens. The transaction is expected to close in the next 15 days.
Progress expects revenue related to the acquisition to be about $2m for the partial-year balance of fiscal 2005. Progress is also granting inducement stock options to purchase a total of 100,000 shares of common stock.EasyAsk founder and chairman Larry Harris, who is currently a member of Progress’ board, will resign his position and become a full-time employee of Progress.
Progress has four other principal operating units OpenEdge (application deployment infrastructure), SonicSoftware (enterprise service bus), ObjectStore (real-time data services) and DataDirect Technologies (data connectivity) born out of past acquisitions.
This is the second software maker that Progress has bought this year. Last month it acquired Apama, a UK-based developer of event stream processing and analysis software used by financial services firms. Apama’s software forms part of the ObjectStore division of Progress.
Progress shares fell over 3% to $25.80 in Nasdaq trading yesterday.
