CRANSTON and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – The principals of McCabe Software Inc. and technology acquisition company Oridium LLC have acquired “substantially all” the assets of ailing Agitar Software Inc., using them to establish a new entity called Agitar Technologies Inc., the companies said. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“David Belhumeur and I are Rhode Islanders who started our company (Oridium LLC) in 2001, specifically with the intent of finding [U.S.] software companies that have had significant venture investments and have customers / revenue / growth potential,” Oridium President Ken Pereira – who also serves as president of McCabe Software and CEO of Healthcare Automation Inc. – told Providence Business News in an e-mail interview today. “Since 2001, we’ve made three major acquisitions: Healthcare Automation, McCabe Software and now Agitar Technologies.”
Agitar, like the other companies owned by Pereira and Belhumeur, will be run from Oridium’s new 10,000-square-foot headquarters in Cranston.
“Agitar has won a multitude of industry and technology awards over the years, and the company has a passionate following in the marketplace, particularly in ‘agile development’ circles,” McCabe Software CEO Belhumeur, who also is CEO and co-founder of Oridium, said in a statement.
Agitar, like the other companies owned by Pereira and Belhumeur, will be run from Oridium’s new 10,000-square-foot headquarters in Cranston.
“We have the good fortune of acquiring not only industry-leading, cutting edge technology but also acquiring the experience and expertise of existing Agitar personnel,” added Dale Brenneman, McCabe’s vice president of technology. “They know the market quite well, have an exhaustive understanding of the technology and an unmatched ability to support it.”
Both companies focus on the creation of software-development tools; their products are employed by defense, aerospace and technology companies around the world.
McCabe has been providing software quality-management and configuration-management solutions for more than 30 years. Its products – available online and through a worldwide distribution network – include McCabe IQ, which analyzes the quality and test-coverage of critical applications using measures including the company’s own Cyclomatic Complexity metric, and McCabe CM, a software change and configuration-management product based on “integrated difference” technology.
Agitar has developed tools intended to speed the release of Java applications, reduce the cost of bugs and ease the updating of new and legacy applications. Its AgitarOne suite of products helps software development teams “to create, use and manage the extensive set of unit tests needed to be truly agile,” the companies said. Those tools are “the result of over $35 million of investment by the previous owners, who decided in April to place Agitar in a trust so that a transaction such as this … could be consummated to drive the company forward in a non venture-funded environment,” the companies said.
Agitar “was a rock star in technical programming circles,” Pereira said, adding: “The board decided it wasn’t on a fast enough growth path to justify more investment [or] continued operations, so creditors took control of it. We bought it from them.”
The California company was founded in 2002 by Roongko Doong and Alberto Savoia, who left Agitar this spring as it began winding down operations and pursuing a sale of its intellectual property, according to Software Development Times.
“Agitar’s and McCabe’s customers have a strong need to develop bug-free software and a thirst for world class tools to reduce costs and improve quality,” Pereira added, “and there is a consensus in the industry that the Agitar technology successfully delivers on those goals in both the traditional and agile software-development arenas.”
“McCabe has always kept on eye on Agitar, because our products are complementary and we have many customers in common,” added Belhumeur. “With our 30-plus-year track record, McCabe is the perfect home for Agitar, whose customers will continue to enjoy uninterrupted product support, customer service and innovative engineering, enhanced by the resources that McCabe Software brings to the table.”
“Agitar had its best quarter … in the history of the company,” in the period ended March 31, Belhumeur added in a telephone interview with PBN. But, he said, “the investors’ expectations – you’re talking about venture capitalists … if the revenue was X, they were looking for three X or five X.”
Although the California company had never reached profitablity, “we believe that investors’ expectations eventually will be met … and the revenue that they wanted to get to, we will eventually get to – but we won’t do it overnight,” Belhumeur said.
“The product’s got a world-class install base … the fundamental basics of the business are very sound. … This [new] company will be profitable from day one.”
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Agitar Technologies Inc., based in Cranston, is the new company founded to acquire the assets and continue the work of the former Agitar Software, a creator of unit-testing tools for Java developers that was founded in 2002 as TestAgility Inc. For more information visit www.Agitar.com.
McCabe Software Inc. has been providing software quality-management and configuration-management solutions for more than 30 years. For more information, visit www.McCabe.com or www.Oridium.com.
