Buying up software companies in the NASDAQ fire sale

Thursday, April 5, 2001

The hottest CAD/CAM/CAE buzzwords of 2001 are "peer-to-peer" and "collaborative." But although they've been echoed incessantly at trade shows and conferences for several months now, will these latest software concepts survive the recent NASDAQ carnage and imploding dot-coms?

There is no stronger answer to this question than yesterday's announcement by SDRC (Cincinnati, OH; www.sdrc.com) that it would acquire Inovie Software Inc. (San Diego, CA; www.inovie.com) for an undisclosed price.

Translation: "It's not a recession, it's a buying opportunity." That theme was mirrored in last week's announcement by Dassault Systemes (Suresnes, France; www.dsweb.com) that it would acquire SRAC (Los Angeles, CA; www.srac.com) for $22 million.

Indeed, SDRC announced plans to expand its products in the buzzword areas, saying it would "combine its Metaphase product knowledge management (PKM) and Accelis e-Business integration suite (e-BI) with Inovie's collaborative project management offerings" to offer secure, Web-based collaboration in the manufacturing and supply chain enterprise. The new solutions will empower virtual business teams to better collaborate in the global e-workplace.

Let's hope for SDRC's sake that its new software products don't make a merely "virtual" profit.