Intentia International

» see intentia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Lawson Software announced on 2 June 2005 that it would combine with Intentia International of Stockholm in an all-stock transaction. The combined company would keep the Lawson name and sit in St. Paul, Minnesota, with the international operations run out of Sweden. Whatever the word "combine" was doing in that announcement, the headquarters question had already been settled.

The offer closed on 24 April 2006. Lawson's own filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission puts it in those words, dating Bertrand Sciard's appointment as chief operating officer to "the close of the acquisition of Intentia International AB by Lawson Software, Inc. on April 24, 2006." The joint release went out the next morning: holders of 5,119,604 series A shares, 157,505,164 series B shares and 23,000,000 warrants had accepted, which came to about 97.4 percent of the shares and 97.9 percent of the votes. The acceptance period was held open until 5 May for stragglers, after which Lawson said it would force out whatever was left. The Stockholm listing ended on 26 May 2006.

Sciard's job was abolished on 24 July 2006, three months after the close, and Lawson said it was discussing his departure. The product outlasted everybody. Movex was renamed Lawson M3 that year, and after Infor bought Lawson in 2011 the same lineage carried on selling as Infor M3, which is what it is called today.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ not a tenner ~

Four men started it in 1984 as a consultancy for logistics and production work, initially around IBM's MAPICS package. The Swedish Wikipedia explains the name, and it is the best thing in the whole record: Intentia is a pun on "inte en tia", meaning not a tenner, because the founders were students with no money. Twelve years later the Stockholm exchange listed the company, and Dagens Nyheter marked the day with a headline the Swedish Wikipedia still cites: not a tenner had become 47 million.

The flagship came out of a 1991 purchase, Entra Data, whose product Intentia rebuilt and shipped as Movex. It was enterprise resource planning for firms that make physical things and move them around, and Intentia committed to rewriting the whole suite in Java rather than bolting a web front end onto what it already had, a job it had finished by the time of the sale. By the time of the sale the company's own boilerplate claimed over 3,000 customer sites in some 40 countries.

~ the last two characters ~

On Thursday 24 October 2002 Intentia was due to publish its third-quarter figures at about two in the afternoon, Stockholm time. Reuters published them first. Intentia put out a release the same day, titled "Intentia Investigates Information Leak", saying only that Reuters had published information about its third quarterly results which Intentia had not released, and that an internal investigation had begun. Within days the company had taken the matter to the criminal division of the Swedish police, alleging illegal use of computer data, a step the wire services reported on 28 October. Reuters said it had published the results after they became available on the internet.

The Stockholm exchange announced its ruling on 4 March 2003, and it is worth reading because it takes the technical question seriously. The report had been sitting on Intentia's own web server, prepared for launch at an address nobody had linked to. That address, the Disciplinary Committee found, was "identical to the addresses used for corresponding information on prior occasions, apart from changes to the final two characters from Q2 or Q3, or similar changes." An initiated person, it concluded, "could guess where the information was and thus gain advance access to the reports."

Anyone who spent time online in 2002 knew this. You looked at a URL, you saw a number in it, and the number was an invitation. I was eighteen that October and four years into being online, and treating addresses as editable was ordinary practice rather than a technique anybody had to be taught. What makes the Intentia case worth a page is that a listed company met that fact in public and decided it must be a crime.

~ how it ended up american ~

The exchange was not unsympathetic. It found that Intentia was one of three listed companies caught the same way, alongside Sweco and Nordea, and that all of them had left reports at guessable addresses for the same innocent reason: the exchange itself wanted documents on company websites the instant they were formally released. The committee ruled the breaches excusable and issued warnings rather than fines. Reuters, which had been the beneficiary rather than the regulated party, was nobody's business at that hearing.

Then the numbers went wrong on their own. On 10 January 2003 Intentia warned that postponed and split contracts had pushed its full-year license revenue below the 1.1 billion kronor it had led the market to expect. Revenue reached about three billion kronor in 2004, which was a serious business and not a large enough one to stay independent while Oracle was swallowing PeopleSoft and Siebel. Lawson wanted scale in Europe and Intentia wanted an owner. What the resulting deal produced was a company with the Swedish customer base and the American name on the door.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »