FatWire Acquires Content Management Assets

FatWire Software has snapped up the content management business of Divine Inc. at a bankruptcy auction in Boston.

The Mineola, N.Y., firm gains Divine’s content server unit (formerly OpenMarket), its participant server unit (formerly Eprise) and 300 customers including BusinessWeek, JP Morgan and Ford.

“We’re delighted to combine the Divine and FatWire teams to provide what we believe will be the most powerful solution for enterprise-level content management customers,” said Mark Fasciano, FatWire’s CEO.

Ari Kahn, FatWire’s chief technology officer said, “Divine’s content management business is highly complementary to FatWire’s J2EE dynamic content management product line.”

For Divine, an incubator-turned-software-firm, it underlines the failure of its acquisition startegy. In 2001, the Chicago company spent lavishly to acquire sagging software firms, including OpenMarket ($59.3M) and ePrise ($43.2 million). Other Divine buys included search and content firm Northern Light and managed hosting specialist Data Return.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but it’s safe to say privately held Fatwire paid no where near this for the remaining assets of the content software firms. The 7-year-old company’s products help Global 2000 companies build and mangae Web sites.