Big changes are afoot at the company where I work (and hold the longest title) in
the coming year. One of them is an agreement with Critical Path, which
we announced minutes ago. I’ll let the press release do the talking…
TORONTO, CANADA (December 14, 2005) – Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) today
announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with Critical Path,
Inc. to acquire substantially all of Critical Path’s hosted messaging
assets, including the customer base, hosted messaging communications
infrastructure, and other related assets, such as goodwill and a
software license for Memova™ Messaging, for up to US $8.0 million in
cash plus the assumption of some related contractual liabilities.
Tucows will maintain the hosted messaging data centers in Denver,
Colorado and London, England. Tucows will also offer employment to the
majority of Critical Path’s hosted messaging operations and support
teams located in Toronto, Ontario.
“With this acquisition, Tucows becomes a leader in hosted
email, especially hosted email for Internet service providers and web
hosting companies,” said Elliot Noss, President and CEO, Tucows Inc.
“It is consistent with our strategy to be a leading provider of
Internet services to service providers. It will deepen our
relationships with existing customers, add a number of new service
provider customers and further diversify our revenue streams.”
“We believe our plan will result in a seamless transition for our new
customers” said David Woroch, Vice President of Sales & Marketing,
Tucows Inc. “We intend to grow the hosted email business by providing a
greater customer experience through our focus on the needs of our
service provider customers and leveraging the features of the Memova
Messaging software.”
“We are excited about the relationship with Tucows,” said Mark
Ferrer, CEO and Chairman, Critical Path. “It gives Critical Path the
ability to continue to offer multiple delivery options for our
software, while allowing us to focus on our core strength – software
development.”
The acquisition will be accounted for as a purchase transaction and has
been approved by both companies’ boards of directors. The acquisition
is anticipated to close January 3, 2006, and is subject to standard
closing provisions and conditions.
From
my point of view as the developer relations guy, this is exciting —
not only does this bode well for the company, but there’s also Critical
Path’s email infrastructure and technology that I’ll get to look at,
document and promote. You can’t give a techie a better Christmas
present than new tech (and new techies to hang out with, too).
If
you’d like to know more, check out the Hosted Email FAQ on the Tucows site, which includes the answers to questions such as:
Here’s our CEO, Elliot Noss (on the balcony), making the announcement to
the Tucows staff. Note the space: we can easily accomodate a few extra
dozen coworkers.
If you’d like something a little more up-close-and-personal, you can hear CEO Elliot Noss talk about it himself in
(it’ll first take you to a disclaimer page — read and understand the
disclaimer and then click the “I read and understood it” button, after
which you’ll be taken to a page with the podcast). In the podcast, he
answers these questions:
You get three guesses as to whom the very smooth and professional-sounding interviewer in the podcast is.
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I woke up this morning in Bangkok and saw this news. I am certainly interested in how this affects the stock price tomorrow.
What is the overall feeling among the employees at Tucows about this?
Joey,
You said. "big changes are afoot at the company where I work in the coming year. One of them is......"
What are the other changes that are coming?
So does that mean it is you in the podcast asking questions?
by the way, that is one heck of an ugly office. as a shareholder, it is quite all right with me to do some remodeling and put in a proper ceiling to work under. the place looks like a factory.
Yes, that's me as the interviewer. It's the first of a number of podcasts that I'll be working on over the coming year, in both audio and video form.
As for the factory-like workspace, well, that's working in a "warehouse conversion" or "office loft". This is typical for the high-tech industry; in fact, every office I've ever worked in full-time that wasn't an apartment of mine or a friend of mine, with one exception, has been in a converted warehouse or factory. I -- and many others -- prefer factory retrofits in funky neighbourhoods to drop-ceilinged offices in buildings in suburban white-collar business parks.
What a great voice. I'd love to pay you to make some romantic sounding tapes for me. I have a girlfriend who likes your type of soothing savvy voice. She likes to listen to DJ's on the radio when we get romantic. We played that podcast last night over and over as we laid in bed. Her body shivered slightly each time you spoke so I'd really be interested in obtaining a full one hour tape of your voice for us to spice up our lives.
I showed her your wedding blog and she started getting jealous of Wendy. She asked about Wendy was so lucky to have a guy with such a good voice. I have a very raspy voice because my vocal cords were damaged in a car accident. What can I do? Anyway, let me know if any recordings are available.
On a more serious note, I see that posters on the Yahoo Critical Path stock message board are saying that these assets were generating a loss for their company.
So I am curious as to why Tucows feels they will immediately generate positive cash flow from these assets. Is it your infrastructure?
Hey, Spammer! Sorry for taking a bit to get back to you.
The general reaction looked pretty good at the meeting when it was announced; there were lots of eyebrows raised in that "hey, that's pretty cool" way.
Hey, Spammer!
Among the changes in the coming year:
Are you sure it's not Elliot's voice that she's reacting to? I've heard several unfounded rumours that there's a 1-800 number that many women call just to hear him say things like "P/E ratio", "messaging space" and "forward-looking statement".
For a definitive answer, I'm going to have to defer to one of the "suits". They know way more about the business details of the acquisition, and they have the business data. I don't.
What Critical Path brings to the table is their technology and expertise in the mail/messaging sphere, while we're bringing the relationships and bundling with other services in our platform. It's the combination that should lead to the aforementioned positive cash flow.