Verity and Cardiff a Complementary Mix

Following a continuing pattern of industry consolidation, enterprise software provider Verity (www.verity.com) is acquiring capture vendor Cardiff Software (www.cardiff.com) in a $50 million transaction. The acquisition furthers the move toward bringing the capture, management and searching of single vendor's product offerings.

Verity will combine its search and auto-classification tools with Cardiff's document capture products, which include TELEform, LiquidCapture and LiquidOffice. "The breadth of the combined product offering expands our footprint in the enterprise," said Anthony Bettencourt, Verity's President and CEO. "The addition (of Cardiff) brings the ability to enable enterprises to optimize their dynamic information assets, capturing the value of interaction between documents and the business processes they represent. Verity has the opportunity to leverage its leadership in intellectual capital management and extend it to content capture, e-forms and business process automation."

"This creates a unique and natural combination of intellectual capital management solutions with content capture, e-forms and business process automation," said Dennis Clerke, President of Cardiff.

Cardiff Software sells its products on a direct basis, as well as through an international network of 350 resellers.

The consulting firm Delphi Group issued a response calling the acquisition "an important step in the direction of incorporating dynamic content in the information intelligence environment. The move follows the logic of what Delphi Group identifies as information intelligence. Most of the information addressed by search-related applications today is fundamentally static captured, indexed, and stored for future demand. In acquiring Cardiff, Verity takes -in this case - the unstructured text and process-state information resident in the forms flow."