Friday, February 27, 2009

Calypso Acquires Fail

UPDATE 2009-04-23 at end of post

Calypso has acquired Galapagos. Wow. Where to begin here.

First of all, Galapagos was the premier product from CodeFarm, which was forced into administration recently (administration ~= UK Chapter 11). So you could easily rewrite the above headline as "Calypso acquires assets of failing technology vendor for super-cheap." But PR doesn't work on telling the truth.

But the real question is why acquire it at all? Want to know what Galapagos actually does? I know, as I've used it.

It's a genetic algorithm for automagically producing CDOs, whose primary claim to fame is that it has a license to run the Moodys models automatically. What a growth industry that is these days! And so many accretive customers that will come along with the deal!

So let's play a game. We'll call it Rewrite The Press Release

Calypso Technologies today acquired the assets of a bankrupt firm specializing in selling to a failed market relying on a discredited feature. In engaging in this transaction, Calypso found a way to acquire some developers it felt were talented in a market where it currently lacks an R&D facility, while allowing the original developers of the worthless software a face and reputation saving way out of their current predicament.
Man, I should be in PR and not in the actual engineering game!

UPDATE 2009-04-23
Apparently, they haven't realized this dog don't hunt. They're trying to hire sales engineers to sell it in NYC. Uhm, guys? The structured products market is pretty dead, and if it does recover, it's probably not going to want a genetic auto-structuring system.

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