The Israeli press has confirmed that Cvidya, the RA software vendor, has been purchased by billing giant Amdocs. They state that the price might be USD30mn. As a consequence, 10 percent of Cvidya’s staff have been made redundant. You can read the story in The Marker (in Hebrew).
Cvidya customers say they have received mail telling them about the acquisition. However, they should have already been aware that a deal was likely, after rumors surfaced in the Israeli press during November.
A reliable source indicates that Alon Aginsky, the founder and former boss of cVidya, will stay on board and will be responsible for driving sales. The same source also hinted that cVidya managed the final number of redundancies by shedding some staff during the run-up to the public announcement.
Monitoring the financial performance of Cvidya has always been difficult, as the privately-owned, VC-financed business was under no obligation to make reliable public announcements about its results. Incorporating the unit into Amdocs will make it even harder to gauge the value of relevant sales, and hence to size the telecoms assurance software market. Amdocs is traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and hence needs to make regular announcements about its audited results. However, turnover from Cvidya’s products and services will be too small to be visible in the accounts of Amdocs.
Salesmen may exaggerate for short-term gain, but free markets tell the truth in the long run. Cvidya was never as big as they pretended to be. After all the speculation about Cvidya’s value, it turns out they were not worth even USD40mn, despite the content of some recent press reports. And whilst Cvidya may have employed 300 people at one time, they have considerably fewer employees now. In the words of the The Marker, the purchase price represents a “yard sale”.
After 15 years of struggle, the abortive start-up has finally succumbed, and will be absorbed into the Amdocs behemoth. Cvidya tended to puff out its chest and proclaim itself a market leader, but now that the business has been sold off, the VC-driven hype can finally be laid to rest. Only a few will miss it.
