After its founders last fall offered to buy back the company and take it private, Ecometry has found an outside buyer for its catalog and e-commerce software business: Syngistix, a Denver-based software company which used to be an HP 3000 software vendor named Distribution Resources Corp. (DRC). It’s been a very long time since there was any significant 3000 development at Syngistix, which gave the gate to much of its MPE expertise over the last several years. In late January the company announced it was offering almost $36 million for Ecometry, $2.90 per share for the 12.4 million outstanding Ecometry shares. The price represented a 20-cent-per-share premium over the Oct. 25 offer from Wilborn Smith and Alan Gardner, the founders of Smith-Gardner, which changed its name to Ecometry in 2000.

The $36 million is an infinite price times earnings for publically-traded Ecometry, since the e-commerce software firm hasn’t posted a profit in the last six quarters. Red ink for all of its fiscal 2001, announced about a week after the Syngistix offer, amounted to $7.3 million on sales of about $26 million. Sales were down over the year by 42 percent, while the losses came in at four times those for fiscal 2000. Ecometry says its bleak finances are a result of a down economy, at the same time promising that it’s fully focused on platforms other than the HP 3000. “Our entire company is focused on the NT and Unix versions of Ecometry Retail Enterprise, running in an open systems n-tier environment,” said president John Marrah. “These products have the same robust functionality of our MPE-based version.”

Ecometry customers should not expect any re-embrace of MPE after the acquisition closes by late March, either. Ex!te, Syngistix’s latest product offering for distribution and fulfillment, is built on Windows 2000 and SQL Server platforms and talks with HP 3000 databases. Some companies still use the older applications from the era of the old DRC — like Client Systems, which operates its North American HP 3000 distribution business on a 3000 running DRC’s System For Distributors software. But the bulk of the new business and development from Syngistix is aimed toward the same Unix and NT markets where Ecometry has racked up so much experience over the last six-plus quarters.

Marrah assured his customers in a letter the deal was in the best interests of a community where nine sites out of 10 still run HP 3000s. “Joining these two organizations will create opportunities that all of us are anxious to realize: the ability to better support and leverage our combined customer bases, the ability to utilize each other’s technology to improve both product sets, and the ability to build and maintain a stronger competitive edge in our market,” Marrah said in his letter.