Interarchy acquired by lead developer

Stephen Withers
Friday, 02 February 2007 02:49

Your IT - Home IT

Interarchy, Stairways Software's long established file transfer and web maintenance program for Macintosh, has been acquired by its lead developer Matthew Drayton.

Drayton, a Stairways employee since 2001, formed a new company called Nolobe as a vehicle for the buyout. Like Stairways, Nolobe is based in Perth, Western Australia. Drayton's brother David is also part of the new venture.

Financial details of the transaction, including past and projected revenues, have not been disclosed. All that is known is that Stairways was the first user of the Kagi payment system to generate revenues of $US1 million.

From a customer's perspective, it is basically business as usual. Customer records have been transferred to Nolobe, and existing licences will be honoured. Nolobe plans to release Interarchy 8.5 - a free upgrade for 8.x licensees - today. Version 9.0 should be released during the second half of 2007.

Drayton told iTWire that Nolobe will not be a one-trick pony, and work is underway on another product. "I don't want to say too much other than it is something we are very excited about."

And the name of the new company? "I could come up with an elaborate story but the truth is Nolobe doesn't mean anything," Drayton said. "It is just a short punchy name like Kodak or Pixar."

Stairways founder Peter N Lewis said "I was looking at retiring (or semi-retiring) in a few years, but that gave no clear succession plan for Matthew or for Interarchy customers.  This 'employee buyout' resolved both of those problems very nicely."

While Stairways will live on after the sale, Lewis has yet to decide the direction it will take: "I might update one of our other programs like Keyboard Maestro [the macro program originally developed by Michael Kamprath] or Greebles [a networkable maze game from the Mac's Classic era], or I might try my hand at building a new web service or writing a game."