Still BroadbandLiving
Buyout keeps company in the game
By Karen Brown
from the March 19, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
It turns out BroadbandLiving was far from easy.
Faced with souring capital markets and general Internet pessimism, Englewood, Colo.-based BroadbandLiving Inc. has agreed to a cash and stock buyout for an undisclosed amount by DigiTerra Inc., a Denver-based enterprise integration and applications provider. Last year BroadbandLiving came out of the gate with BroadbandAgent, a software package offering high-speed service providers a way to gauge customer interest in services, manage transactions and better sell service bundles. Among other things, BroadbandAgent's interactive software quizzes customers, provides them suggested bundles of available hardware and services, and then lets them choose their own packages.
But then the Internet drought hit in late 2000. Needing financial support to grow the business, BroadbandLiving execs decided acquisition was a better alternative than taking their chances on a sour venture capital market, according to spokesman Dustin Young.
"Venture capital these days is lengthy, difficult and not meeting with a lot of success," Young says
The linkup finalized on Feb. 28 between DigiTerra and Broadband Living actually began last summer, when DigiTerra's parent company, CIBER Inc., invested in BroadbandLiving to help deploy its platform. DigiTerra has a 20-year integration track record developing customer service and management products for enterprise clients, but it had nothing aimed at the growing broadband access market.
"They never really had a huge broadband presence, which is why they bought us," Young says. "This really allows them to extend their service offerings into the broadband space for ISPs, access providers and enterprise."
Audley Webster, executive vice president of strategy and market development for DigiTerra, says BroadbandLiving will bring an Internet link to its core business providing customer service, procurement and resource planning.
"In our minds, the next evolution is a broadband-enabled Internet, where everybody--residences, small businesses and large businesses can interact with each other in a broadband way," he says. "So as we think about that solution taking hold, we are kind of somewhere in the late early stage in our minds. As we think of that, we needed to bring in-house a capability that allows us to offer that to customers as a total solution."
BroadbandLiving will become a unit of the company, renamed DigiTerra Broadband. Its marketing and client list will for now exist somewhat outside the company's core business, but Webster says he sees that changing as high-speed access--and therefore the need for broadband system integration--grows.
"Right now we think it is still early enough in the evolution that some of the service providers themselves form a nice nucleus that is a little isolated from our main client base," Webster says. "So we are going to have them focus heavily on their sweet spot and then over the course of time integrate them into DigiTerra as a whole."
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