Brad Feld

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IBM acquires Cyanea

Aug 02, 2004
Category Investments

On Thursday of last week, IBM announced that it had acquired Cyanea. James Chong – the CEO at Cyanea – is taking a senior management role at IBM, as James will be running the Application Management Group within Tivoli. As part of his new role, he will be integrating the various application management technologies that IBM has through Tivoli, their recent acquisition of Candle, and the acquisition of Cyanea.

We’re extremely excited about this deal. Cyanea has been one of the most successful early stage software companies I’ve ever been involved with. They shipped their first product within 9 months of being funded and in their first year of product shipments became one of the top providers of APM products.

IBM was an initial investor in the company and James had engineered a very substantial OEM agreement with IBM. We were in the final throws of closing a significant Series B financing when IBM made an offer for the company. James, the team, and the investors struggled with whether to go it alone or be acquired – IBM ultimately made it attractive enough for us to choose the acquisition route.

While I didn’t make our original investment in Cyanea, I took over responsibility for the company when Bill Burnham left Mobius. Bill wrote a good post on the APM market after the transaction was announced – I recommend it if you have interest in the players and technology in the APM market.

Between IBM’s acquisition of Cyanea, IAC/InterActiveCorp’s acquisition of ServiceMagic, ePartners merger with EYT, and solid July performances from a number of my portfolio companies, it was a busy but satisfying July.