Stellent Acquires Kinecta Corporation
Strategic move enhances Stellent’s enterprise content management solution with robust content integration and distribution capabilities
EDEN PRAIRIE, MN, April 3, 2002 — Stellent, Inc. (Nasdaq: STEL), a global provider of enterprise content management solutions, announced today it has acquired the assets of privately held Kinecta Corp., a leading provider of software infrastructure for content distribution.
The strategic move enhances Stellent’s end-to-end content management solution by providing content integration and distribution capabilities. Combined with the Stellent Content Management technology, these new capabilities will enable Stellent’s enterprise customers to aggregate content from multiple repositories, manage it in the Stellent environment and distribute it to any audience. Additionally, the technology will allow Stellent customers to easily deploy content from staging environments to production environments and roll back to earlier versions of Web sites. The patent-pending Kinecta technology is built on industry standards such as Java, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Information Content and Exchange (ICE).
“Syndication enables greater reach to a Web content management strategy,” said Mark Gilbert, research director for Gartner. “It allows diverse Web sites to be synchronized, so that content discrepancies are not an issue. It can also bond an enterprise to its channel partners better, offering up-to-date content to diverse audiences without a large labor cost of trying to do it all manually.”
Stellent will continue to market the existing Kinecta product line while integrating the technology into the Stellent Content Management system. The initial product integration will be released in the quarter ending June 30, 2002.
“While the number of content management vendors is decreasing due to the natural market maturity consolidation process, this technology will become critically important to Global 2000 organizations struggling to gain control of their content,” said Andrew Warzecha, senior vice president at META Group. “Indeed, these trends will force content management vendors to broaden (e.g., content types, global compliance) and deepen capabilities (e.g., development collaboration, support for native authoring tools, application server stack integration, content aggregation/syndication/exchange). Vendors that can evolve rapidly to support these requirements will be best positioned to succeed.”
As part of the acquisition, Stellent will hire Kinecta’s core development team and retain Kinecta’s current office located in San Francisco, Calif. Adam Souzis, chief technology officer for Kinecta, will join Stellent as vice president of development for the San Francisco office. Souzis is a recognized expert on emerging Internet standards such as XML and ICE. He helped define the ICE standard for Web-based content syndication, representing Kinecta as a member of the ICE Authoring Group. Prior to co-founding Kinecta, Souzis was engineering lead at NetObjects, where he shipped three versions of the company's flagship product Fusion.
“Kinecta is the established leader in content distribution technology,” said Vern Hanzlik, president and chief executive officer for Stellent. “Their leading-edge software has been implemented in high-volume, mission-critical production environments for more than two years and will quickly benefit those Stellent customers who have been demanding this type of solution. Truly robust enterprise content management requires access to, and management of, all of the business content within an organization, regardless of location or file format. Our acquisition of Kinecta’s assets will enhance Stellent’s existing content integration and distribution capabilities and further strengthen Stellent’s position as a leading vendor in the enterprise content management space.”
Key Customer Benefits
The combined technologies will provide the following benefits to Stellent customers:
• Content Integration and Aggregation – enables content from external media or a variety of repositories (such as Microsoft SharePoint) to be moved into the Stellent Content Management environment for management and publishing to Web sites and applications
• Content Deployment – enhances users’ ability to easily deploy content from staging environments to production environments and to roll-back to earlier versions of Web sites
• Content Distribution – allows users to move content to external sites and users, including business partners and employees
• Remote Content Tracking – allows content providers to track remote content usage by both internal and external users
Mark Kraus, director of e-business for Emerson Process Management, said his existing Stellent Content Management implementation will benefit from the enhancements provided by Kinecta’s technology. “The combined solution will enable us to seamlessly access and integrate content from other repositories, such as FileNet and Microsoft’s SharePoint, for publishing to our partner extranet site. It will also allow us to easily and efficiently push content out to remote employees and sales channels.”
Kinecta currently provides its e-business solutions for establishing and managing business-to-business content networks to industry leaders such as FT.com, Economist.com, Fidelity Investments and Reuters. Reuters, for example, standardized its technology platform on XML using the Kinecta technology, giving them flexibility and the ability to easily feed content to more than 900 Internet sites reaching an estimated 40 million viewers, regardless of the sites’ technology parameters or structure.
Current Kinecta solution components include Kinecta Syndication Server, which provides entities within a business network with updated content as needed; Kinecta Content Directory, a tool that enables companies to increase awareness of and access to their content; and Kinecta Content Metrics, which enables companies using the Kinecta Syndication Server to obtain content usage metrics that help them develop, distribute and target content more effectively throughout their content and syndication networks.
Conference Call
Stellent will host a conference call at 1:00 p.m. CST today, April 3, 2002, to review this announcement. Callers in the United States can dial (888) 542-9137, and international callers can dial (706) 634-6660. No pass code is required. Participants simply need to identify themselves and request to be placed on the Stellent Conference Call. Participants are encouraged to dial in at least five minutes before the start time. Time will be allotted for questions and answers. A replay of the conference call will be available until midnight, April 10, 2002 for U.S. callers at (800) 642-1687 (ID #3742535) and international callers at (706) 645-9291 (ID #3742535).
Stellent Content Management Features
Stellent Content Management rapidly deploys scalable content-centric Web sites and manages business and Web content for other e-business applications, such as enterprise portals and business commerce applications. The system Web-enables business content by aggregating content from multiple sources, converting it to Web formats, managing and publishing it to the Web, and personalizing it for specific audiences, devices and applications. Stellent Content Management allows anyone, from one to thousands of users, to easily contribute content via a browser in any format and automatically convert it to a variety of Web formats, such as PDF, HTML, XML, WML and cHTML. The system also integrates with existing security systems and provides business personalization features. For information on how to obtain the Stellent Content Management system, contact Stellent at 1-800-989-8774.
About Stellent, Inc.
Stellent, Inc. (www.stellent.com) is a global provider of enterprise content management solutions for scalable business Web sites. The company has been ranked one of the top three content management vendors by industry analyst firms Gartner Dataquest, Forrester Research and Aberdeen Group, and has more than 1,500 customers, including much of the Global 2000. Its customer roster includes Merrill Lynch, Agilent Technologies, Target Corp., Cox Communications, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard and Ericsson Telecom AB. Stellent is headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn. and maintains offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific
A principal of Fairmount Partners acted as an advisor to Stellent in connection with the acquisition.
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