International Law

Another India buy

By admin

On a day when the Economic Times reported KKR’s Henry Kravis talking about the difficulties of buying into the India market, news came of yet another technology acquisition with an India connection. Salesforce.com announced its USD 31M acquisition of the US/India web conferencing company DimDim.

The DimDim acquisition follows the recent acquisition of another US/India operation, Pangea3, by Thomson Reuters. Nexus Venture Partners is one of the funds exiting DimDim - Nexus Principal Suvir Sajan (who co-founded Bazee.com) was an angel investor in Pangea3.

DimDim started off as an open source alternative to webex and other commercial web meeting offerings. It also provided free and commercial hosted offerings. There were however complaints that the open source version significantly lagged behind the hosted offerings provided by DimDim. This space has also seen the emergence of another open source alternative, BigBlueButton. Quite unclear how Salesforce arrived at the 31M valuation for a supposed open source player with a hosted offering. But not my job..

Being an end-user, all I do is receive messages like these:

Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the ?Agreement?) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.?s (?Dimdim?) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (?You?), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.

The end.

Full post as published by Technology Law India on January 07, 2011 (boomark / email).