April 20, 2009

The new Attensity — deal overview

A new Attensity Group has been created in a complex set of maneuvers. So far as I understand or guess, elements of the deal include:

I was told on the phone empolis was doing something like €30-40 million. Attensity and Living-e were under $10 million each. That surprises me a bit, as I thought Attensity was in that range on commercial business alone, and was doing more than $10 million counting its government accounts.

It turns out that if I had been paying attention to the news filters I could have seen this coming. Specifically, a March 16, 2009 story said:

German media giant Bertelsmann has confirmed the sale of its software development unit empolis to data management holding Attensity empolis Europe.

Attensity empolis Europe is based in Switzerland and part of the holding company founded by former IBM manager Ian Bonner.

A Bertelsmann spokesperson told Handelsblatt that empolis, which develops software for semantic analysis, did not fit in strategically anymore. empolis was part of Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato employing 200 people with revenues of around €30m.

Attensity’s acquisition of empolis adds to the recent takeover of Living-e which was acquired in December 2008 for a symbolic price of one euro after its former majority shareholder Klaus Tschira, one of the SAP founders, was not willing in invest more money.

Tschira, however, is still intent on investing in Attensity empolis which was part of the agreement on Living-e. His portfolio includes holdings in 26 companies with combined revenues of €200m.

I don’t immediately know how to reconcile the apparent contradictions between that and the information above.

I plan to post with technology/business thoughts when I have a chance.

Comments

5 Responses to “The new Attensity — deal overview”

  1. Seth Grimes on April 20th, 2009 9:16 am

    Curt, there’s another bit to the story that you’ll find interesting. The companies + German consultancy brox are backing the Eclipse SMILA semantic-integration framework, which they appear to intend to use as the basis for a rich-media search engine. Attensity NLP technology would handle text.

  2. Helge Brzoska on April 21st, 2009 8:50 am

    Hi, maybe you’ll find this resource helpful: http://eccenca.broxblogs.com – best, Helge

  3. Helge Brzoska on April 21st, 2009 8:53 am

    sorry . it’s .. http://eccenca.broxblogs.de – I shld know …

  4. Sebastian Sybrecht on August 7th, 2009 3:22 am

    Hi, the above resource is down. You will find the official news here: http://blogs.eccenca.com/news
    Regards,
    Sebastian

  5. Attensity update | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on April 14th, 2011 7:07 am

    […] years ago, Attensity merged with two other companies in somewhat related businesses, thus expanding 4X or so in […]

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