Amdocs Ltd has acquired the assets of Xchange, formerly Exchange Applications Inc. The purchase price was $5.1 million, according to Eric Schmitt, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
Xchange, which closed its Boston-based headquarters last month, was auctioned off in the offices of Reimer & Braunstein, a Boston law firm. Of the two dozen companies rumored to have requested the auction prospectus, the final bidding came down to two, Schmitt said.
Schmitt doubted that Amdocs would pick up many of Xchange’s clients. Amdocs, a Chesterfield, MO-based firm that specializes in billing and CRM software, will likely gear Xchange’s offerings to the telecommunications industry, following the course it took following its acquisition of Clarify, Schmitt said.
In October 2001, Amdocs bought Clarify, a CRM provider that specialized in the communications sector, for $200 million in cash.
Schmitt added that "a minority" of Xchange’s client base, which consisted of between 70 and 80 companies, consisted of telecommunications firms, and suggested that most would seek other marketing management solutions such as Unica Corp.’s Affinium.
Unica, Lincoln, MA, has already announced a program offering special prices for Xchange clients that wish to migrate to the Affinium platform.
Xchange, once one of the high-fliers in the CRM technology field, had seen its fortunes mirror the dot-com collapse. Since its inception in November 1994, it had grown rapidly and by early 2001 employed nearly 500 employees. At the end of 2000 the company reported total equity of nearly $106 million.
But the dot-com crash destroyed much of the Xchange’s value. In June 2002 it received notice from the Nasdaq stock market that it was no longer in compliance with the listing regulations, and its stock was moved to the Over the Counter Bulletin Board.
