4 ms·

Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A ro

by jey 16y ago

Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.

staunch 16y ago
The price does seem relatively low. ITA's revenues are probably not very significant for Google, so they may be buying purely for the team and technology. And for a team and technology acquisition $700M is pretty huge.
vessenes 16y ago
I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did. I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.
- jey 16y ago
  They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price. This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- amirmc 16y ago
  Returning 2x might also be a good thing for the VCs too. I assume, getting some liquidity back is probably important to them in the current climate.
  - hga 16y ago
    The most recent investors, who probably invested at least in part based on the promise of RES are no doubt happy to get out with something like this.
hga 16y ago
ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases. Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a outline and link to the talk see: http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html). RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time, which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC. The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer. In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.) This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.
- jurjenh 16y ago
  That, and google has an aversion to common lisp... so it would need to be a rewrite. EDIT: Mind you, I've only heard of the aversion to lisp, so have no data to back my claim up. That said, it has been mentioned several times on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023
  - avar 16y ago
    The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No". That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700 million whose core tech is written in Lisp.

by jey 16y ago

staunch 16y ago

The price does seem relatively low. ITA's revenues are probably not very significant for Google, so they may be buying purely for the team and technology. And for a team and technology acquisition $700M is pretty huge.

vessenes 16y ago

I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did. I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.

jey 16y ago
They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price. This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
amirmc 16y ago
Returning 2x might also be a good thing for the VCs too. I assume, getting some liquidity back is probably important to them in the current climate.
- hga 16y ago
  The most recent investors, who probably invested at least in part based on the promise of RES are no doubt happy to get out with something like this.

hga 16y ago

ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases. Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a outline and link to the talk see: http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html). RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time, which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC. The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer. In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.) This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.

jurjenh 16y ago
That, and google has an aversion to common lisp... so it would need to be a rewrite. EDIT: Mind you, I've only heard of the aversion to lisp, so have no data to back my claim up. That said, it has been mentioned several times on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023
- avar 16y ago
  The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No". That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700 million whose core tech is written in Lisp.