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Monday 11 February 2008

LeCayla bought by OpSource

OpSource’s acquisition of LeCayla was announced today.

Conor Halpin and I met with OpSource in Santa Clara late last year, and I was immediately impressed by Treb Ryan and his team. LeCayla’s business has been growing to the extent that we needed to open a physical presence in the US to serve customers, and convert US based prospects. We considered various options: organically building a direct presence ourselves; acquiring an existing US company; or partnering with a stronger and complimentary US operation. We talked both to our existing Irish based investors, and potential new US based VC investors interested in the SaaS delivery space.

In the end, acquisition by OpSource makes a lot of sense. LeCayla was already a customer of OpSource’s hosting solution, and both companies were thus aware of each other. OpSource has a vision of a complete SaaS delivery platform: not just basic hosting, but also valuable services such as analytics, visualization and now - via LeCayla - billing. OpSource brings a wider reach of deployed customers; LeCayla brings OpSource not only a well architected and proven self-service billing solution, but also an excellent engineering team and a business presence in Europe. It is my understanding that Treb Ryan intends to retain Conor Halpin and all of his team.

I have enjoyed working with Conor and the board of LeCayla, and sincerely wish the entire teams of OpSource and LeCayla not only success, but fun in achieving that success while working together.