IPO values digital publishing & collaboration specialist Azurn at $45m

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 07:50

IT Industry - Strategy

Azurn has an impressive list of global publishing clients - including Cambridge University Press and McGraw Hill - and has entered into an agreement with Intel Corporation and Acryn to offer an educational collaboration product to schools through the United States.
 
Azurn has also entered into an agreement to provide Hughes Communications with an education platform to deliver lessons to students in India via their satellite network. Hughes plans to use Azurn's software to facilitate interactive courses being offered by Indian educational institutes through its satellite network and to expand its programme to over 500 cities in India within the next 24 months.

Azurn at present no telco partnerships in Australia (back in 2005 it said it was in discussions with Primus." Rao told iTWire that the company was now looking for suitable Australian partners. "Our model is to sell through resellers and we are looking at the best way to get the Australian business going: it could be a telco or an ISP."

Azurn as it is today was formed through a merger in October 2007 of Azurn International and Value Chain International. Azurn was founded in 2001 in Boston, USA by Tony Giroti (still an executive director of Azurn). The company was relocated to Australia by Dr Bala Kumble (an executive director and president) who developed the Merlin product.

Value Chain International is a global provider of content management solutions, specifically to the publishing industry. It "conceptualises, designs and implements solutions that address the emerging imperatives of players in a rapidly changing digital publishing industry." Value Chain was established in 2005 by Rao, Rama Kumble (executive director & president) and a number of key executives from the Australian, UK, USA and Chinese operations of Infosys Technologies. In 2006, VCIL acquired Digital Publishing Services, which digitises current and backlist libraries for publishers and assists in secure online marketing of digital content. Rao was the founding managing director of Infosys Australia, and left that company to start up Value Chain.

Azurn was awarded its key patent "Unified XML voice and data media converging switch and application delivery system" in 2005.  Rao said this was now one of four "very valuable patents around audio video and data convergence that are really the foundation of the business."