Francisco Partners To Acquire Ex Libris Group

Technology-focused private equity fund reportedly paying $62 million for Israeli ILS

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 9/1/2006

Another ILS vendor is to get gobbled up by an outsider. Ex Libris Group announced July 26 that it has “entered into a definitive agreement with Francisco Partners,” a large technology-heavy private equity fund, “for the acquisition of 100 percent of the company’s shares” for a reported price of $62 million. The purchase comes after years of rumors that the Israeli-based Ex Libris was seeking a buyer. Subject to regulatory and third-party approvals, the transaction is expected to close by September 2006.

A letter to employees from Ex Libris president and CEO Matti Shem Tov stated that “Ex Libris will remain an independent company run by its existing management team. The company’s headquarters will remain in Jerusalem and reporting lines with the subsidiaries, branch offices, and distributors will be carried out in the same manner as today.” The communiqué also assured that neither rank-and-file employees nor customers will be affected by the purchase. While these reassurances are the standard trappings of any acquisition, only time will tell if they prove out, as anyone who has followed other ILS vendor buyouts can attest.

Although industry insiders long have contended that Ex Libris had been feeling around for a buyer, Laura Gilinski, the company’s MarCom manager, told LJ that “Ex Libris was approached by Francisco Partners,” rather than the reverse. Gilinski also reaffirmed that it will be a very hands-off relationship: “The transaction is simply a change of ownership.” While that might soothe jittery customers concerned over their contracts, the downside is that research and development (R&D) money often follows buyouts but apparently not so here. “There will be no injection of R&D funds into the company,” Gilinski said, but “the financial backing of Francisco Partners will enable us to explore acquisition opportunities for complementary products in the library automation and e-resource markets,” as well as pave the way for “continued development and enhancement of existing products.”

At press time, the deal had not been concluded, but Gilinski offered assurances that “the process is proceeding according to schedule.”

Meanwhile, Ex Libris is making headway with its new Primo platform, which will search across a library’s complete offerings. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, and University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, are partnering with the vendor to bring Primo to market in the near future. Ex Libris said the front-end product offers “a single unified solution for the discovery and delivery of all local and remote scholarly information resources, including books, journals, articles, images, and other digital content.”

On the stat front, Ex Libris and MPS Technologies completed a “successful transfer of Yale University usage data” between their systems using the automated SUSHI protocol. The test was a trial run for “future integration of ScholarlyStats (an online portal of library usage statistics) usage data” into the vendor’s electronic rights management (ERM) product, Verde. The ScholarlyStats data will let Verde automatically integrate the usage data from more than 35 major vendor platforms with other subscription information.