Once one of the great hopes of the EAI boom of the late 90s, Vitria has struggled over the last five years. Now I just noticed that they recently announced that they are going private.
The purchasers are Vitria founders Dale Skeen (current CEO) and his wife Jomei Chang (founding president and CEO). When Reuters bought Teknekron (which soon morphed into Tibco) they used their $10m to start up Vitria. As this 2001 story explains, Vitria's 1999 float was one of the more ebullient - priced at $16, hitting $273 just three months later.
Vitria was perhaps the first EAI company really to 'get' the idea of process level (rather than data) integration. Perhaps their biggest problem has been that their proprietary approach had hardly started to gain acceptance by the time industry standards - web services, service oriented architecture, BPEL and the rest - pulled the rug from under their feet.
Adjusted for stock splits, a peak price of $400 compares to a sale price of $2.75 per share. It will be very interesting to see what Chang and Skeen manage to make of the rump of their creation.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
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