PTC to acquire Arbortext for $190 million

BANGALORE: PTC has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Arbortext, Inc., a company in the emerging dynamic enterprise publishing market, for $190 million in cash. Arbortext serves 1,700 customers worldwide in multiple industries, including discrete manufacturing, life sciences, financial services, insurance, publishing and government.

With this acquisition, PTC will be positioned to enable customers to create, manage and dynamically publish critical information concurrently with the development of related products or services, improving time-to-market, quality, cost and customer satisfaction.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of July 2005, subject to customary conditions including regulatory approval. The transaction has been approved by Arbortext shareholders.

“For 20 years, PTC has helped more than 35,000 companies develop superior products and improve productivity in product development,” said C Richard Harrison, president and CEO of PTC. The complementary PTC and Arbortext solutions will enable companies to better capture and deliver critical content that is the basis for a wide variety of upstream and downstream enterprise deliverables.

“This acquisition is a natural extension of PTC's product development system vision. Together with Arbortext, we will enable discrete manufacturing customers to manage product content and related documentation from concept through retirement,” Harrison continued. “Additionally, this acquisition expands our footprint into new verticals such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, government and traditional publishing by providing these customers with a complete solution for highly personalized product or service offerings.”

Arbortext has 250 employees in offices around the world and has generated approximately $40 million of revenue during the past 12 months. Arbortext's solutions are revolutionizing the way companies deliver critical business information to multiple audiences through its “dynamic enterprise publishing” approach. International market research firm IDC has ranked Arbortext as a leader in the emerging Dynamic Enterprise Publishing software market, and predicts this market will grow more than 25% annually to over $1 billion in 2009.

“Documentation is based on content that evolves constantly, and as such, the process of publishing has traditionally taken place only after products or services are well defined,” said Ray Schiavone, president and CEO of Arbortext. “This has resulted in a manual hand-off of information between various departments where each must laboriously reshape the information to suit their own needs. In addition, the tools traditionally used by companies to publish documents are not flexible or powerful enough to solve the complexity of this process. They require a substantial manual effort, and produce generic information that attempts to meet the needs of all audiences while satisfying none. Arbortext's technology approach is completely different from that of traditional tools, and significantly reduces waste and duplication inherent in the publishing process today.”