Pacman used to be my favorite game back in the 80’s. I could spend hours navigating the yellow chomper around eating up all of the pac-dots, avoiding the ghosts then timing it just right to grab the power-pellets and turning on the ghosts and chomping them up for maximum points.
The recent announcement that IBM is acquiring Lombardi reminded me of that old game, not just because it brought up the image of a big yellow (or Blue) image of a hungry mouth chomping down on a small helpless ghost company (ironically flashing blue when vulnerable), but rather the whole lifecycle and fortunes of smaller companies and their ultimate futures.
Lombardi is certainly no spring chicken. Founded in 1999 specifically to solve human-to-system business process problems in a category known as BPM (Business Process Management) software. Lombardi had recently garnered decent interest as a key component of data governence enforcement and business process re-engineering as part of Master Data Management (MDM) initiatives. For example, Lombardi was OEMed by Siperian (disclosure, my former company). Certainly there eventually has to be an exit strategy for all technology companies as their investors demand. These days acquisition is more the norm than an IPO. The Pacman analogy that popped into my head related to how every young software company has designs on being top of their category (lots of ambitious ghosts) and competing with the big boys like IBMs and Oracles in deals (the Pacman), these upstart ghosts run around feeling invincible, due to their technology innovation lead, which does for some time, cause the big boys to shy away/lose deals. However, big bad Pacman continues to go about its business chomping up more pac-dots than they could ever do because of their enormous size and reach. Then at some point, Pacman decides enough is enough for this power-pellet category, and turns around and chomps up these annoying little upstarts. For many, it ends up being game over … or maybe since that was the goal in the first place … this is “extended play”?
Which brings me to my MDM related point, 6 months ago I blogged about cleanse vendor AddressDoctor’s acquisition by Informatica in that post I referred to the spate of MDM related acquisitions. Informatica has since also acquired complex event processing company Agent Logic as well (See here for how much Informatica paid for those companies). Which incidentally makes Lombardi the 3rd major Siperian OEMed component to be acquired (the other being Identity Systems also by Informatica in 2008). Further to that post, I also wrote a tongue in cheek post about Mega vendors vs. Best of Breed MDM in the style of Seinfeld.
IBM’s acquisition of Lombardi could be interpreted as play on among other things the MDM ecosystem. Especially significant since it’s not like IBM doesn’t already have a bunch of workflow capability already. So it seems to me that the MDM BPM power pellet (see Pacman game screen below) has been eaten and IBM and other hungry Pacmen are coming after the ecosystem components surrounding MDM (BTW Since I wrote this post, Oracle, another MDM Pacman has since acquired Silver Creek (also a partner technology for Siperian but not OEMed), see my comments on that acquisition here).
For now there are still a few Siperian and Initiate Systems ghosts out there, nipping at the heals of the Pacmen. Siperian and Initiate both have valuable technology and offerings that have led major corporations to select them over the big boys. For example, Siperian’s flexible data model and non-application packaged MDM approach has demonstrated itself to be significantly more cost-effective and extensible in multi-domain MDM deployments. While Initiate Systems continues to feature an impressive list of customers, which includes notable names such as long-time customer and partner Microsoft.
Thank goodness for all of us who still believe in best of breed and independent software startups.
