Osborne told ZDNet Australia the company accepted IBM's acquisition offer -- for a sum the parties declined to specify -- after rejecting two "serious and credible offers" from other tech heavyweights. However, he declined to name the companies involved.
Big Blue announced on Tuesday in the United States its acquisition of all outstanding shares in the privately-held company Presence Online Ltd, which trades as Aptrix.
It is already moving to add the company's Web content management software to Lotus' portfolio of offerings, with the acquisition accelerating plans to deliver a Workplace Content Development product.
Osborne said the acquisition had the support of Aptrix' senior technical staff as well as the remainder of its 40-odd employees. The company, while headquartered in Australia, also has offices in London and Massachusetts.
He described the deal -- about which discussions first started in April -- as "a perfect fit strategically and culturally".
Osborne said the seeds of the acquisition were sown in internal assessments earlier this year of the company's status and the Web content management market as a whole.
These found that the Web content management arena was undergoing significant consolidation and that while Aptrix was a successful company, it was not a very large player. Acquisition was therefore the best option for the company's shareholders, a combination of venture capital funds, staff and founders.
IBM's director of Lotus Software, Michael Loria, told ZDNet Australia that Web content management software was "less and less" likely to remain a distinct market segment, with its future lying in a becoming a compelling part of portal, collaboration and enterprise content management offerings.
Aptrix has been an IBM Lotus business partner and has built its product around IBM's Domino.
The new capabilities will provide IBM customers a way to create, publish, manage and archive Web-based content within a corporate intranet, extranet and Internet environment.
Aptrix technology was designed to work with current Lotus Domino, WebSphere and DB2 Content Manager environments.
Oh great, we use Aptrix, so that means that the yearly subcription and maintenance costs will double, just like it did for Lotus Domino server and client licences when IBM took over Lotus.
How fantastic !!!