Excalibur Technologies to merge with ConQuest Software; text and multimedia information retrieval leaders join forces to expand products, channels and markets.SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 6, 1995--Excalibur Technologies Corporation, a leader in multimedia information retrieval information retrieval Recovery of information, especially in a database stored in a computer. Two main approaches are matching words in the query against the database index (keyword searching) and traversing the database using hypertext or hypermedia links. software announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to merge with ConQuest Software Inc., a leading provider of advanced text management software. Excalibur will remain the surviving corporation with the management and product sets of both companies retained going forward. The merger has been approved by both boards of directors and is subject to final approval by ConQuest shareholders and an opinion letter to account for the transaction as a pooling of interests Pooling of Interests An accounting method, used in mergers and acquisitions, where the balance sheet items of the two companies are simply added together. Notes: The opposite of pooling of interests is the purchase acquisition method. . ConQuest is a privately held company privately held company A firm whose shares are held within a relatively small circle of owners and are not traded publicly. based in Columbia, Maryland Columbia is a census-designated place and planned community in Howard County, Maryland, United States. It is a suburb of Baltimore, and, to a lesser degree, Washington, DC. It began with the idea that a city could enhance its residents' quality of life. . The merger will bring together a combination of search and retrieval technologies, market coverage and management teams positioned to serve the rapidly growing markets for online and Internet publishing, document management, business and government intelligence and other document-driven applications. With the integration of the Companies' technologies, the market will benefit from a comprehensive toolset for text, image and multimedia information management. The merger provides that Excalibur will issue approximately 1.4 million restricted shares of its common stock and 570,000 restricted stock options to the ConQuest shareholders in exchange for their ConQuest stock and options. ConQuest reported audited results for 1994 of approximately $1.8 million in revenue and $4.4 million in expenses. Mike Kennedy Michael Kennedy (born April 13, 1972 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a former professional ice hockey centre who played in the National Hockey League from 1994-95 to 1998-99 for the Dallas Stars, Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders. , CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of Excalibur, will be CEO of the combined companies. Edwin Addison, President and CEO of ConQuest will assume the post of Executive Vice President. Addison will also become a member of the Excalibur board of directors. "The integration of Excalibur's adaptive pattern recognition and ConQuest's semantic network (data) semantic network - A graph consisting of nodes that represent physical or conceptual objects and arcs that describe the relationship between the nodes, resulting in something like a data flow diagram. technologies, along with the strengths of our respective toolsets, will create the most advanced architecture and product suite in the market," said Mike Kennedy, CEO of Excalibur Technologies. "This merger will add significant technology to Excalibur EFS EFS Encrypted File System (Microsoft Windows 2000) EFS Event Free Survival (survival rates in clinical trials) EFS Evangeliska Fosterlandsstiftelsen (Sweden) , our flagship document imaging product, including the addition of natural language search techniques and the ability to create real-time user profiles. Excalibur intends to deliver a powerful follow-on to Excalibur EFS that is completely modular, with open interfaces, in a highly scalable client/server package. This product will be developed with protection of the investment of our current Excalibur EFS customer base as a primary objective." Edwin R. Addison, President and CEO of ConQuest, said, "One of the reasons for selecting Excalibur as a merger partner is for the synergy between our products, technology and management. The ConQuest semantic network searching capability and profiling provide valuable enhancements to the Excalibur product set. Likewise, Excalibur's image server will be a complementary component to ConQuest for client/server applications requiring content-based access to both text and images. This strong combination of information retrieval technologies should help Excalibur achieve its goal of becoming the leading provider of information retrieval technology for business and government customers." Excalibur's customer list of over 500 customers includes many leading corporations (Ford, Boeing, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Amgen, NYNEX NYNEX New York-New England & X for the Unknown (Telephone Company) NYNEX New York Network Exchange ) in addition to numerous agencies in federal, state and local governments. Having adopted a strong channels distribution strategy, Excalibur now has a worldwide distribution network consisting of over 130 authorized VARs, Systems Integrators and OEMs in over 50 countries. Founded in 1989, ConQuest brought to market scalable, commercial systems in 1993. Since then, ConQuest's enabling technology has attracted major customers and partners seeking to build and implement new text processing applications. ConQuest has recently closed major agreements with ADP's Brokerage Information Services See Information Systems. Group, and with two leading business information publishers, whose identity is confidential. ConQuest's markets include major corporate and government customers who produce and/or use very large and diverse text databases. ConQuest's text management tools drive such diverse information services as Infonautics' Homework Helper on Prodigy, the federal government's Global Change-Assisted Search for Knowledge on the World Wide Web, and Physicians' Online. The company's semantic approach to text retrieval, advanced client/server design, and robust integration tools have been the determining factors in winning major customers and partners in electronic publishing An umbrella term for non-paper publishing, which includes publishing online or on media such as CDs and DVDs. , litigation An action brought in court to enforce a particular right. The act or process of bringing a lawsuit in and of itself; a judicial contest; any dispute. When a person begins a civil lawsuit, the person enters into a process called litigation. support, and business and government intelligence. Pending ratification of the merger agreement by ConQuest shareholders, Excalibur will make further announcements regarding product integration, pricing and availability and marketing. About Excalibur Technologies Headquartered in San Diego, Excalibur Technologies Corporation is a leading software developer dedicated to improving the way industry manages and retrieves information. The company's pattern recognition technology -- APRP APRP Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing (Convera) APrP A Priori Probability (TM) -- forms the basis for a product line of software applications and toolkits that allow software developers and end users to manage and retrieve digital information including text and images. Future applications may include sound and full-motion video. Additional information about its products can be found on Excalibur's homepage on the World Wide Web which can be accessed over the Internet at http://xrs.com. Excalibur was founded in 1980 and is a publicly-held corporation trading under NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on (EXCA EXCA Exchangeable Card Architecture EXCA European Expanded Clay Association (Brussels, Belgium) ). For more information, contact Excalibur in North America at 619/625-7900, or in the United Kingdom at 44-1344-893-444. About ConQuest Software Inc. ConQuest Software delivers natural language text management software tools to meet the business challenges of publishers, vendors and information end-users. ConQuest products are driving new solutions for Internet access to heterogeneous information libraries, competitive intelligence, open source research, real-time news management, intelligent publishing, litigation support, market research and other key, text-intensive applications. ConQuest delivers real-time profiling and retrospective retrieval engines, full Boolean, statistical, heuristic A method of problem solving using exploration and trial and error methods. Heuristic program design provides a framework for solving the problem in contrast with a fixed set of rules (algorithmic) that cannot vary. 1. and word meaning-based concept search technologies, semantic network knowledgebases, and a complete set of application development tools. -0- Note to Editors: Excalibur Technologies Corporation and the Excalibur logo are registered trademarks of Excalibur Technologies Corporation. APRP is a trademark of Excalibur Technologies Corporation. ConQuest is a trademark of ConQuest Software, Inc. Other brands or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. CONTACT: Excalibur Technologies Darrell Atkin, 619/625-7900, ext. 419 datkin@excalib.com or Phase Two Strategies Beth Johnson, 415/772-8419 beth_johnson@p2pr.com |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion