System iNetwork

Initial acquisitions, under both common formats, often appear the same to the outside world, but in the first method noted above, the company simply can't keep up the charade for more than a few months. They say they are interested in growth, but there's no evidence of growth — no acquisitions, no real or compelling product enhancements, and certainly no new products.

In the second, the company buys other companies, enhances products, pours development into new products, works out better go-to-market strategies, and hires new talent. In addition, the company stays in touch with the relevant media outlets in its market and is eager to talk about its new efforts, the results, and to share its excitement for the both the market and what the company is up to.

The acquisition of disaster-recovery and high-availability providers Visions Solutions and iTera by Thomma Cressey Equity Partners is one example of the second sort of acquisition. The new company is buzzing with activity, and company leaders are willing and eager to step up with proof points that share exactly what they're up to with anyone who will listen.

Let me say it again: Aldon is the second sort of acquisition.

The proof, of course, will reveal itself over the next year. So why do I think this? Marlin Equity Partners, which is the company that acquired Aldon, is a fairly new organization, but it appears to be in the business of building companies and selling them for profit. The managing director, David McGovern, comes from the Gores Technology Group, which is a large private equity group that was responsible for reviving SSA when it was tanking in the System i industry. SSA, as you might remember, rose from the ashes through a series of acquisitions and positive business investments.

Then, of course, there's my conversation with Dan Magid, former CEO of Aldon, and Matt Scholl, president and COO of Aldon. Magid, by the way, will remain with Aldon as a consultant who will look to help Aldon execute its growth strategy.

A Bit of History

"This really started a year ago as we were looking at our product plan and figuring out the things we needed to do to satisfy the requirements of our customers as they were taking advantage of all the new technologies — moving into multi-platform, web development, Windows development, service-oriented architecture," explains Magid. "As all these were happening, the list of things we needed to do started to grow rapidly, and we were looking at some very large projects. As we looked at the development schedule of how long it was going to take us to do those things, it looked like it was going to take us too long to get our customers what it was they wanted."

So Aldon started thinking about buying other companies that had solutions it could acquire and wrap into its application lifecycle management suite.

"We found that a lot of the organizations were bigger than we could swallow, so we didn't have the resources to do that [acquire other companies] and began to look for financial partners who could help us execute on this kind of strategy," Magid says.

According to Scholl, Aldon then sought a partner or buyer who had the financial backing and interest to work with Aldon on its growth plans. A deal with UNICOM Systems, Scholl says, which is the company that went on to acquire SoftLanding Systems, did not work out. However, a deal with Marlin Equity Partners did work out.

So What's Next?

Aldon is currently seeking solutions to add to its change-management system but can't identify the possible companies and products yet.

"We've been the largest provider of change-management systems in the System i marketplace, and what we want to do is provide our System i customers with more things as they are moving into new technology areas," Magid says. "The marketplace for the traditional System i management is pretty mature, but the marketplace for the things they are doing around their System i applications, building web interfaces and web applications around their iSeries code or building Windows interfaces or putting services that talk to their traditional iSeries applications . . . that is changing and moving forward very rapidly. We want to be able to provide our customers with solutions in that kind of arena."

Specifically, Aldon is looking into potential testing tools, business process automation tools that help companies work through the business process changes that coincide with new software application rollouts, build process tools for the open source environment, and tools that manage non-DB2 database changes.

"Our strategy is to be like an ERP system for the IT application development and management organization," Magid says.

The proof, of course, will show through in the coming months as we hear from Aldon customers, see new acquisitions, and hear the company communicate its product roadmap to the industry it serves.