InfoVista Announces Acquisition Of Accellent

Published 1st November 2007

InfoVista adds Application CentricNetwork Monitoring Solutions to Infrastructure and End-to-End Performance Management Capabilities...

Paris, France, Herndon, VA – October 30, 2007 – InfoVista (Euronext IFV - FR0004031649), the leading service-centric performance management software vendor, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire France-based privately held Accellent, whose application network monitoring solutions are used by large French and international organisations to ensure the delivery of mission-critical and revenue-generating services. The acquisition adds advanced application response and traffic monitoring to InfoVista’s solutions that already include best-in-class infrastructure performance management and end-to-end application and service quality monitoring capabilities.

Reflecting the complementarities between the two companies, InfoVista management does not expect any restructuring. The Accellent team will become InfoVista employees and integrated into a newly formed Business Unit.

Purchase Price
The acquisition price, without taking into account an earn-out component payable in 2011 based on high growth objectives, was €13.5 million. This works out to an enterprise value revenue multiple of 2.6x as Accellent’s expected revenue for the current fiscal year, ending in June 2008, is approximately €4 million and the Company is expected to have cash and cash equivalent of approximately €3 million as at the date of acquisition. The acquisition price takes into account Accellent’s double-digit revenue growth over the past years and its 30 per cent net margin.

The acquisition, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, is expected to be completed by November 21.

Acquisition offers additional revenue opportunities for InfoVista and will be earnings accretive
InfoVista plans to exploit additional revenue opportunities and leverage potential synergies through the acquisition of Accellent with top-line synergies expected to be accretive to earnings as early as fiscal year 2008. Accellent’s product offering presents a uniquely complementary fit with InfoVista.

Commenting on the deal, InfoVista’s CEO and Chairman Alain Tingaud noted: “The combination of InfoVista and Accellent allows us to bring together two companies with best-of-breed technologies in complementary markets and geographies to deliver the most comprehensive performance assurance solution available today from the communication infrastructure to the end-user including the services and the application. The acquisition significantly strengthens our offering, complementing and leveraging our existing platforms, and should yield important revenue synergies.”

Eric Fries, CEO, Accellent stated: “By joining forces with InfoVista we now have the global reach to bring our capabilities to the largest organisations worldwide and more effectively penetrate the service provider market. We’re excited about becoming part of a team that shares our emphasis on technology leadership and a deep understanding of what customers need to successfully leverage business-critical applications.”

Additional Information and Note to Editors:

Enhanced application performance management through the combination of InfoVista and Accellent

Accellent’s 5View family of products supports collection of application usage and traffic data using NetFlow and highly granular application monitoring using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) mechanisms. Additionally, Accellent’s powerful ability to store, manipulate and analyze current and historical data complements InfoVista’s extensive reporting capabilities. When mapped to InfoVista’s performance data, network managers receive unprecedented visibility and control to tune their infrastructure to deliver specific application-based Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

In addition, Accellent’s solutions will allow InfoVista to extend its solutions for end-to-end monitoring of voice video and TV on IP. InfoVista will therefore be a key player in the monitoring and management of next generation Triple Play services.

Accellent solutions will continue to be available as standalone products. Initial integration to the VistaInsight® family of products will be available in the next quarter and more comprehensive integration through VistaFoundation®, InfoVista’s underlying technology platform, by mid-2008.

Enabling Superior Performance Management
According to the market research firm, Yankee Group, application performance management is one of the top five issues driving global network management strategy. More than 70 per cent of network managers actively spend time troubleshooting application performance. But understanding application performance from an end-user experience and usage perspective is difficult.

By combining application-centric network monitoring with InfoVista’s industry-leading infrastructure performance management solutions, enterprise customers and service providers will be able to actively troubleshoot application performance issues at the network or end user level.