Jan, 2002 : Divine Announces Acquisition of Northern Light

📅 January 23, 2002 - divine, inc., (divine.com), an integrated solution provider, announced yesterday that it has acquired certain assets of privately held Northern Light Technology LLC (northernlight.com), a provider of search and content integration solutions, in an all-stock transaction. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Those companies that can effectively leverage and apply their external andinternal knowledge resources to gain a deeper understanding of theircompetitors, industry conditions, and developments in their value chain willbe positioned to more quickly adjust to evolving market conditions," saidAndrew "Flip" Filipowski, CEO of divine. "This combination of divine'sexisting content management and content aggregation solutions, and NorthernLight's vast collection of premium content offerings enable divine to offerinformation-rich solutions for portals, intranets, Web sites and extranets,helping our customers gain a competitive edge."
Northern Light Technology products include Special Collection, an onlinebusiness research library of over 70 million pages of full text documents;SinglePoint Custom Content Integration service; RivalEye, a customizedcompetitive intelligence solution; and the Northern Light Enterprise SearchEngine, which features Northern Light's patented classification technologyand customizable 17,000- term taxonomy. In addition, Northern Light'sflexible e-commerce transaction engine allows micro-payments, subscriptions,coupons, refunds, and aggregation for monthly billing.
The acquisition enhances divine's ability to offer content through NorthernLight's Special Collection, an online desktop business research library withmore than 7,100 electronically procured and presented documented sources,including Forbes, Business Week, American Banker, Economist, New York Times,Investext database of equity analyst reports, and key vertical industrypublications. In addition, the acquisition of Northern Light strengthensdivine's content management and delivery solutions for the publishing andmedia industry by expanding the number of sources divine can offer and byproviding a better interface for locating specific content.
"Merging content with the technologies that find and manage it is a logicalnext step in the development of content-related applications," said SusanFeldman, director of content and retrieval software research at IDC. "In thepast year, divine has acquired content management vendors such as Eprise andOpen Market, and information aggregators such as RoweCom and Sagemaker. Byclosely integrating search and content management with a collection ofhigh-quality information sources, divine offers enterprises a single pointof entry into both their internal information sources and the external onesthat are strategically necessary to their survival."