It seems that of the bevy of small companies that cropped up in the middle of 1996 with various types of push technology, only three are going to survive as independent entities, at least for now.
At about the same time that Marimba Inc, BackWeb Technologies Inc and PointCast Inc came to light, a few other, smaller companies attempted to have their voice heard as well. One of them, inCommon Inc was yesterday acquired by Reuters Holdings Plc for its Tibco Software Inc subsidiary, to add its push technology to Tibco’s multicasting broadcast technology. In fact the two companies have been partners since last summer (CI No 3,154) and had integrated Tibco’s TIB/Rendezvous as one of inCommon’s transports by last summer. Financial terms were not disclosed. inCommon has a push software product called Downtown, which, the San Mateo, California company was aiming at the publishing industry. But, according to chief executive, Jay Verkler, when Netscape Communications Corp and Microsoft Corp decided to give away their Netcenter and Active Channel technologies to publishers, a change in business strategy was clearly needed. It also used neural nets and heuristics to learn about users’ habits, but moved away from that for something simpler and decided to concentrate on information management. Verkler reckons Tibco bought the company mainly for its people – at least 10 of the 12 are moving over including the main technical brains – its front-end, in particular the ability to deliver event notifications to users, its distributed caching technology and its back-end processing technology. inCommon had about a dozen customers apparently. Verkler becomes Tibco’s VP internet technology as part of the deal. Although partners for about 10 months, the two companies started talking about a possible acquisition around October, said Verkler and Tibco’s co-founder and chief technology officer Mark Bowles. The latest move has contributed to an unsettling twelve months in the push technology marketplace. Back in July, BackWeb Technologies Inc acquired struggling Toronto-based Lanacom Inc, and after a serious slimming down operation, Intermind Corp announced in October that it would be resorting to chasing patent infringements (CI No 3,264). I think Tibco has decided it needs a little bit more web specific expertise and this is probably a relatively inexpensive option, says Datamonitor analyst Dean Bubley. I understand inCommon has a fairly solid product, but the whole of the push market is suffering a bit from 1996/1997 syndrome. It’s not as obviously flavor of the month anymore, he adds.
Content from our partners
