Work news

[ewx]

As you might have heard, a company called SafeNet has made an offer to take over my employer.

It's not my first time. My first employer, ElectricMail Ltd, was bought by a company called Kewill Systems Plc in late 1997. Kewill had been successfully growing by acquisition for some time and was more like an agglomeration of similarly themed companies than a coherent whole at the time; and they wanted to get in on the Internet.

At the same time they also wanted to try and integrate their various bits more closely, and although they could make all the branding uniform it became clear that ElectricMail was not a great fit; we couldn't magically sprinkle Internet over their other operations, which in turn were happily figuring out this new[1] networking stuff by themselves. We adopted their branding and supplied various services to some of their other UK bits but realistically I think they'd have coped without us one way or another.

Kewill's share price rose dramatically during the period we were owned by them; I do regret not buying shares in them - selling even some time after they peaked could have been extremely profitable. Gotta love hindsight.

Anyway in 2000 the ElectricMail name suddenly reappeared and we were sold off to a firm called NetConnect. Don't bother following the link, it doesn't work. (Amusingly a page of mine beats all the stories about the sale if you google for ‘netconnect electricmail’. It's not called the Sinister Greenend Organization for nothing, you know.) Anyway, the businesses were much better fits - NetConnect were a competitor of ElectricMail's - and those of them I had dealings with were a nice bunch - much more like normal people than some of the rather high-powered Kewill people - but in the end they didn't really seem to know what to do with me and eventually I got thoroughly bored and left for better things (I wasn't the only one).

My memories of the first of these takeovers are largely positive (it was a shame they made a friend redundant, but I'm not sure it did him any lasting damage); I got some money out of it and it put the company on a much stabler footing (I later heard it said that among the alternatives were bankruptcy; I don't know if this was so but I wouldn't have expected the person saying it to do so unless they knew it).

I can't really say the same of the second though.

So what about SafeNet? Obviously there are limits to what I can say, hence the lengthy rambling about ancient history above instead.

They're a competitor, which makes the two firms an obvious fit in the way that Kewill and ElectricMail were not. They've grown by acquisition like Kewill, but I'm not sure any conclusions can be drawn from that other than that they're not engaging in some big strategic shift by offering to buy us.

Of course being bought by a competitor is worrying for other reasons, and any takeover or merger would be expected to produce what might euphemistically be referred to as efficiencies. So am I worried about my job? SafeNet's CEO talks up nCipher's employees in the PR; the PR also mentions enterprise key management, which is what I've been working on lately. So I'm feeling fairly relaxed about it, actually.

Comments

[lnr]

"NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, IN, INTO OR FROM AUSTRALIA, CANADA OR JAPAN" *blink*

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You'd better not send a copy to any of those countries then...

[lnr]

But what if any of your unsuspecting canadian, australian or japanese readers happens to click on your link? Should they turn themselves in for downloading it by mistake?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

...or if they follow the link from the nCipher home page, for that matter (we have a bunch of employees in Canada following the takeover of Abridean (http://www.abridean.com/)), plus an office in Japan IIRC. I've no idea.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

SafeNet... I know that name from somewhere. *ponders* Ah, yes. The VPN access I have to a client's site uses a rebranded SafeNet client. *shudders*

Anyway, best of luck with it -- never been taken over myself, but heard enough to know that the 'settling down' period can be interesting!

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I've been in the thick of it, in a large-scale corporate takeover, and I can happily tell you that all the jealousy, backbiting, stupidity and counterproductive destructive competition that blights corporate life boils over. Read Dilbert and laugh... And I hope that small-company life is more sensible.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

There is always something a little doom laden about being bought or merging

1. If it's with a competitor then one of the two companies will probably shrink or change to doing something else, it may take time, and it's not always clear which one it will be but it happens eventually.
   


2. If you're being bought by a company that uses your technology then you end up feeling demoralised because you have to abandon many of your other customers. Again it may not happen immediately but your new owner will control the direction you take and that may not be a good direction for anyone but them.


3. If you're being bought by a company that has lots of vaguely connected enterprises that they are sure will benefit from your skills and technology then you'll both spend a frustrating few years discovering that their other stuff needs to be rewritten pretty much from scratch to use any substantial part of your code. Projects will be announced by senior management to do this, then other projects will be announced to re-implement your stuff pretty much from the ground up as that will make the previously announced projects much easier or possible completely unnecessary.
   
   Eventually all of those projects will be abandoned because they will cost too much, and remove too many people from work on the existing code. At this point there may be some management reshuffling.


4. If you are taken over by somebody really big then they'll be able to fulfill all 3 above roles.

Or maybe I'm getting too cynical.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

If it's with a competitor then one of the two companies will probably shrink or change to doing something else, it may take time, and it's not always clear which one it will be but it happens eventually.

My own experience of n******'s complete lack of internal communication and general inability to manage projects effectively suggests that if the competition are even remotely on the ball, it won't be them...

It does make me glad I got out when I did, really; that's a whole new flavour of employment-uncertainty stress that I honestly think I'm better off without. I'm curious to know if I can make anything of my share options thought.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I hope it all goes well.

[gerald_duck]

Coo; interesting.

The last time I spoke to Alex at any length must have been 1992 or so; back then he didn't use phrases like "leverage" and "global footprint". Hmm…

[ewx.livejournal.com]

When selling to the French, you do better if you speak French; so when selling to people who like to say “leverage”...

(Although I don't know why the word is such a, um, thelobish, I suppose; it seems a perfectly good metaphorical repurposing of an existing word, not really much different from any other allusive use of language.)