Melissa Data, a direct mail services firm, has purchased Peoplesmith Software, a direct mail software firm, for an undisclosed sum.
Among the half-dozen or so employees at Peoplesmith, Melissa plans to keep on two or three programmers and technical support staff, according to Greg Brown, director of marketing at Melissa. Sales staff and executives will not be joining Melissa, he added.
Melissa will continue to operate Peoplesmith’s Scituate Harbor, MA office, using it as an East Coast presence. Melissa is based in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA.
“The gentleman who owns the company was looking to retire,” Brown said. “The stars were aligned at the right time for both parties.”
Melissa had been a reseller of Peoplesmith’s offerings for 15 years. The acquisition does not expand any of Melissa’s markets. But it does give the firm the opportunity to more seamlessly incorporate Peoplesmith’s products into its own offerings.
These offerings include StyleList, a database-field formatting tool; Personator, a “genderizing” tool; DoubleTake III, which performs merge/purge functions; and RightFielder 3, which transforms jumbled text data into information that can be used with database programs.
The fate of two other offerings, Genderbase 100 and Dirty Harry’s Character Assassin, are up in the air. Dirty Harry’s Character Assassin, which removes extraneous characters from data, will probably be eliminated, and Genderbase is similar to another Melissa offering. According to Brown, these two products make up a relatively small percentage of Peoplesmith’s sales.
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