Kiva Software

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

~ the obit ~

Keng Lim started KIVA Software Corporation in May 1994, in Mountain View, on the bet that a browser would end up being the front end of a business application. Somebody would then have to sell the piece in the middle: the thing that holds a session, talks to a database, and stays up while a thousand people hit it at once. In 1994 there was no word for that piece.

Kiva Enterprise Server shipped in January 1996 and the word turned out to be application server. Kiva's claim to having been first is contested, because NetDynamics was shipping in the same window and both companies said it, but the category and the product arrived together, and Kiva was one of the two companies holding it. It ran Java, barely a year old in public at that point, and it also ran C++, because in 1996 betting a product entirely on Java was a thing only Sun could afford.

The customer list is what makes it serious rather than early. Bank of America, E-Trade, Travelocity, Hong Kong Telecom, Internet Shopping Network, Pacific Bell Internet. All six of those are transaction systems, and they were running on a server product from a company that had taken 13.9 million dollars across two rounds from Greylock and Norwest among others. By the middle of 1997 Kiva had shipped two major releases, passed 100 employees and opened five field offices.

Lim told Red Herring that year he expected to go public by the middle of 1998, barring an acquisition. He got the acquisition. Seven days separated the signed agreement from the closing.

~ january 1996 ~

Very little was settled in the month Kiva Enterprise Server went on sale. Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the current browser. Java applets were the thing everyone was excited about, so the industry's working model of dynamic web software still had the program running on the visitor's machine. Kiva's product assumed the opposite: keep the program and the state on the server, send the client nothing but a page. That is how essentially all web software has worked ever since, and it was a minority position when Kiva shipped.

The irony is that the company got absorbed for being right early. An application server was a strategic hole in Netscape's server line in late 1997, and buying the hole shut was faster than building. Netscape's suite already sold the web server and the directory server. The box between them was the gap.

~ knife ~

The acquisition subsidiary Netscape used was called Knife Acquisition Corporation. The exhibit list in Netscape's 1997 annual report has it plainly: an agreement and plan of reorganization dated 24 November 1997 among Netscape, Knife and KIVA, then an "Agreement of Merger dated December 1, 1997 by and between Knife and KIVA". Somebody at Netscape named the vehicle that would absorb Kiva after a thing you cut with. It went into the public filings under that name and nobody made them change it.

~ what the filing says the price was ~

Nothing. Pooling of interests was the accounting treatment, and a pooling carries no purchase price anywhere in it. Netscape issued 5,303,684 shares to Kiva's existing stockholders on 1 December 1997 in exchange for all of its capital stock, with roughly 740,000 more reserved against options granted to Kiva employees, for about 6.0 million shares in total. Kiva's Series A and B preferred converted into 2,823,938 shares on the way through. Direct transaction costs, mostly investment banking and legal fees, came to about 5.8 million dollars, and Netscape's historical financials were restated as though Kiva had always been part of them. The widely repeated 180 million dollar figure is the market valuing the shares, not a sum anybody paid.

I met this category as a student, years later, under the name J2EE, and by then the lineage was buried under two more brands, with Sun's name on it and BEA's name on the thing it competed against. Kiva is the sort of company that dies invisibly: its customers kept running the same software on the same ports, and only the splash screen changed.

~ the code base that won ~

The old site outlived the merger by months. The Internet Archive's copy of kivasoft.com from 1 February 1998, two months after the merger closed, still titles itself "KIVA Software: Home of KIVA Enterprise Server (650)526-3900", with the sales line sitting in the title tag where a tagline would go.

Kiva Enterprise Server became Netscape Application Server. AOL bought Netscape in 1999 and handed the server business to Sun, which licensed it for 350 million dollars over three years and rebranded the whole line iPlanet. Sun had bought NetDynamics, Kiva's old rival, the year before, and there was talk that the iPlanet application server would be some combination of the two. It was not. They picked the Netscape Application Server code base, and that code was Kiva's, so the company that lost the race to be acquired went on to lose the one that mattered.

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