Transaction Enhances Absolute’s Asset Management Capability and Provides Entry to the IT Service Support Management Market
Vancouver, Canada: November 5, 2012 – Absolute® Software Corporation (“Absolute” or the “Company”) (TSX: ABT), the leading provider of persistent endpoint security and management solutions for PCs, Macs, iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry devices, today announced it is acquiring the assets of privately-held LiveTime® Software, a SaaS and on-premise help desk and IT Service Support Management (ITSSM) provider.
LiveTime® Service Manager enables IT teams to become proactive in their organization’s business strategy. It gives IT a platform to migrate their service from one of reactive incident response to a more holistic approach involving the entire business, its processes and workflows. With LiveTime® in place, IT can provide exceptional customer assistance, streamline technology costs, implement workflows for service requests, incidents, change requests, releases and service level agreements, and audit compliance with policies and regulations. All of this is done through an easy-to-use, highly scalable web-based service platform that works on the same device platforms as Absolute’s existing solutions.
LiveTime®’s technology is proven and robust with a global reference customer base that spans large to small organizations in the education, corporate, government and healthcare market verticals. The business is currently profitable and cash flow positive. LiveTime® Service Manager has received PinkVERIFY ITIL® 3 Certification from Pink Elephant for 11 Processes. Pink Elephant’s PinkVERIFY assessment is recognized as the IT service management industry’s original program for certification of software that supports the definitions and workflow requirements defined by ITIL.
“The benefits of this transaction are twofold,” said John Livingston, Chairman and CEO at Absolute Software. “First, LiveTime® will quickly meet the needs of Absolute Manage customers that are looking for help desk and service management functionality. This need was identified in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools, and has been a regular request from our customer base. Second, LiveTime® products, which will be re-branded as Absolute Service and Absolute Help, open up another $4 billion market for Absolute. By leveraging our traditional technology strengths and sales infrastructure, we are well positioned to penetrate this market and to generate long-term organic growth.”
Consistent with all of Absolute’s solutions, Absolute Help and Absolute Service will be differentiated based on ease of use, rapid deployment and multiple device support; providing customers with the required functionality without the extensive professional services and development work most solutions in the market currently require. The systems will also integrate tightly with Absolute’s current solutions. A portion of this work is already done, as the LiveTime® help desk product completed baseline integration with Absolute Manage several years ago. The integration work will also extend the benefits of Absolute’s Computrace® persistence platform.
“We are excited about the accelerated growth opportunity this transaction creates for our LiveTime® technology,” said Dr. Darren Williams, CEO of LiveTime®. “By joining Absolute, we gain access to more robust sales channels as well as a larger marketing, research and development, and customer support infrastructure. Further, Absolute’s SaaS and on-premise solutions perfectly complement our offerings, which will create a best-of-breed solution platform for our mutual customers. We have already been winning deals over the leading ITSSM vendors and expect this transaction to rapidly increase our market penetration.”
The total cost of the acquisition is less than $15 million and consists of a mixture of cash and stock, of which approximately 60% is due on completion with the remainder due based on a three year earn-out. Absolute expects this transaction to be neutral to cash from operating activities in fiscal 2013 and accretive to cash from operating activities in fiscal 2014. Absolute intends to complete this acquisition on or around November 19th, 2012, subject to approval by the Toronto Stock Exchange.
“With LiveTime®, we are acquiring market-leading technology together with the key people who built it and who are truly visionaries in their space,” added Mr. Livingston. “These are the same characteristics that made our last acquisition great. LiveTime® complements our existing offerings, giving us a unique platform amongst the leading ITSSM vendors. We will leverage our existing sales channels, Software-as-a-Service business model, current customer base and unique embedded position in computer firmware to drive growth over the long-term. We welcome the LiveTime® team and look forward to becoming a major player in the help desk and ITSSM market.”