Divine Picks Up Northern Light Assets

Divine Inc., the Chicago-based provider of extended enterprise services, announced on Tuesday that it has purchased some of the assets of Northern Light Technology LLC, the Cambridge, Mass., enterprise content integration provider, in an all-stock transaction. Financial details were not disclosed.

Northern Light, best known for its free Web search engine, announced in January that it would shut down that service to the public to allow the company to “focus more exclusively on the needs of enterprise customers.” Whats left of the public search system is the only portion of Northern Light that was not picked up by Divine, Camille Roberts, director of marketing communications for Northern Light, told eWEEK.

Acquired assets from Northern Light include the “Special Collection,” an online business research library with approximately 7,100 electronic documented sources, including major business publications such as Forbes, Business Week, American Banker, the Economist and the Investext database of equity analyst reports; the Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine, with its patented classification technology; and Northern Lights e-commerce transaction engine, which allows payments for content on a per-view basis, subscriptions, coupons and other services.

“This combination of Divines existing content management and content aggregation solutions, and Northern Lights vast collection of premium content offerings enable Divine to offer information-rich solutions for portals, intranets, Web sites and extranets, helping our customers gain a competitive edge,” said Andrew Filipowski, Divines CEO in a written statement.

Northern Lights CEO David Seuss and Senior Vice President of Content Development Robert Nelson will join Divine in “senior positions.” Gregory Whitten, a former chief software architect of computer languages and office applications at Microsoft Corp., and a primary investor in Northern Light, will serve as a technology adviser to Divine.

Over 80 percent of Northern Lights employees will be kept on with Divine, and those employees will remain in Cambridge, Mass., said Roberts.