Visio buys Kaspia Systems
Technical drawing software maker Visio says it has acquired Kaspia Systems, a developer of network documentation tools, for about $23.3 million.
Under the terms of the agreement, Visio acquired Kaspia for 482,985 shares of Visio stock. Visio will record a one-time charge of approximately $1.2 million for acquisition-related costs in the September quarter.
With this transaction, Visio has acquired the Kaspia network documentation tools and software and will retain 15 Kaspia employees, including the entire Kaspia development team, based in Beaverton, Oregon. Visio intends to incorporate the Kaspia auto-discovery technology into a future product offering, code-named Venice, which is expected to ship before the end of 1998, the company said.
Kaspia's Network Audit Technology (KNAT) discovers what devices are connected to a given network to measure how that network is performing, tracks relay performance, and produces a picture of a network. Within the Java-based Kaspia Report Center, users can view the reports available within KNAT or create their own.
"Since our introduction of Visio Professional a year and a half ago, we've seen tremendous market response to our easy-to-use graphical solution for documenting networks of any scale," Jeremy Jaech, president and CEO of Visio, said in a statement. "Kaspia is an important investment for Visio. It will enable us to reach into, and beyond, our current installed base of network customers with new capabilities for automatically producing diagrams and tracking changes to enterprise networks."
With the combined technologies, users of Visio's Windows-based business diagramming and drawing tools will be able to generate visual diagrams of their network that can identify and display logical connectivity and vendor and model-specific information on every piece of equipment on their network, whether it's all in one building, spread across a country, or spanning the globe, according to the company.