UPDATE 10.24.2008: The acquisition is 100% official, so I’m updating this post to be a little less anonymous regarding the buyer. I’ll post the press release when it comes out.
So, the big news is that my company, Network Insight, was recently acquired by CenterBeam. The formal press release has been delayed (due out the week of 10/27/2008), so I won’t announce the buyer just yet…although all of our clients and most of our colleagues are already fully aware of the details.
What does this mean for those of us at NI? It means we’re becoming a much larger organization, with much better funding, a much larger footprint, and are gaining a number of very (very) complementary offerings. The Professional Services and Managed Services that Network Insight provides to it’s customers is very similar to what our buyer CenterBeam does for theirs, but the overlap in services is incredibly minimal. We’ll finally be able to accomplish many of the things we’ve been hoping to over the past few years. Additionally, it will allow the employees of NI to have a broader spectrum of peers surrounding them, and have more opportunities for career growth.
What does this mean for our acquirer CenterBeam? Much of the same, ironically, despite our size being much smaller. We will allow them to take on business they’ve had to turn away over the years, add to their experience, and help them spread their wings. They will gain efficiencies, redundancies, and skillsets they do not have today. I will say that everyone I’ve worked with over the past couple weeks has been incredible…this truly appears to be a great company that has “it” figured out, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how things pan out.
Network Insight has always been a company that does very well during economic booms, and very well during economic busts…but just does average when things are in the middle. Right now, we’re in an economic bust and we’ve been doing quite well over the past months and years of the downturn. The most recent accelerated downturns, and this acquisition, will bode quite well for both companies. Singularly, we were each able to substantially reduce costs (both OpEx and CapEx) for our customers…together we’ll take that benefit to new heights, which is exactly what CFO’s have their eyes open for today…more than ever.
As for me, my life just got a whole lot busier! I’m going to be responsible for much of the integration with respect to all of our (and their) technologies, and have started the process of researching and learning what each company has to offer so we can make educated decisions on our future product catalog…not to mention the systems used to service that catalog and our customers. This will certainly be a daunting task, but believe it or not…I’m really looking forward to it!
