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.