Seattle, Washington based technical drawing software house Visio Corp has signed an agreement to acquire all technology and assets of privately-held Bellevue, Washington based InfoModelers Inc for an undisclosed number of shares of Visio stock. It’s been a busy twelve months for Vision who acquired Boomerang Technology Inc back in March (CI No 3,111) and followed that up by buying certain assets of SysDraw Systems Co (CI No 3,156) to enable it to expand into network design. Visio says it plans to incorporate Infomodelers’ key database design, modeling and query technology into future product offerings but did give a timeframe. Jim Horsburgh, vice president of sales and marketing for Europe commented: they’ve got some key technology that is very interesting to us, particularly in the area of database design, an area that is becoming more important to our business. Peter Mullen, vice president and general manager of the Visio business products unit, said that around 25% of its Visio Professional users are already doing database application design and the new acquisition would allow the company to strengthen its offerings in this field. Visio says it will account for the acquisition as a purchase, and will take on fifteen of InfoModelers’ current employees including the entire engineering team. Visio estimates it has around 1.5 million users worldwide.
