Eclipse at Cloud Expo

Actuate, the people behind BIRT, the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools open source project, is going to acquire Toronto-based Xenos and its roughly 90 employees for $3.29 a share cash, a net price of $26.7 million after subtracting the roughly $8.74 million Xenos had in the bank back on September 30.

We're talking a 56% premium here.

The combined company is supposed to expand the market opportunity for the BIRT Web 2.0 development environment by transforming content and structured data into BIRT-based Rich Information Applications (RIAs).

Xenos, which has got a string of 350 brand name customers, including 170 of the Global 1000, provides a scalable Xenos Enterprise Server that extracts, transforms, repurposes and personalizes data and documents culled from clients' supply chains for storage, real-time access, e-presentment, printing and delivery in numerous formats across multiple channels.

It'll take Actuate a while to turn the widgetry into one of its BIRT iServer BI modules and morph data and documents into BIRT-based applications. It's expecting the acquisition to close next quarter.

Actuate CEO Pete Cittadini claims, "The market is calling for integrated solutions that enable a wider range of compelling BIRT-based Rich Information Applications that harness untapped content, such as print streams and documents, and combine it with structured data sources."

Actuate will have to use its existing credit facility to get the deal done although it will still have $58 million on hand. It anticipates the transaction will be accretive to its fiscal 2010 non-GAAP earnings by three cents a share.

Xenos has released preliminary unaudited results for the fiscal year ended September 30 of approximately $16 million in revenues and income from operations of $1.5 million.

Seventy-five percent of Xenos customers are in banking, credit cards, insurance and brokerage and the rest include manufacturing, telcos, government, healthcare and logistics. It has more substantive indirect channels than Actuate does.