Congratulations Semphonic!

I don’t blog much anymore (and aren’t you all lucky that I don’t, I would be taking up a “blog slot” from all the people at Luna who have real talent.) But I cut the line so that I could congratulate our friends at Semphonic, with special call outs to Gary Angel, Joel Hadary and Phil Kemelor.  As many readers probably know already, they were purchased by Ernst & Young on Friday.

Semphonic isn’t the first analytics firm to be purchased.  Certainly, EpicOne did it a few years ago when they sold themselves to a company, local to their market, who specializes in automotive sites. There are probably quite a few others that I don’t even know about. But Semphonic did something really special .  This was a strategic sale of a boutique consultancy to an international accounting and consulting firm, and it was enormously important for our industry.

The sales we’ve been seeing in our industry almost always carry strong intellectual property with them. Adobe purchased Omniture and its software suite, Sitecatalyst/Test&Target/Discover. IBM purchased Coremetrics, as well as companies like Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo. We consulting companies bring different opportunities to the table. Sure, we have great branding and awesome links/rankings and a kick-ass client roster. But mostly, we bring know-how.

And it’s so clear that the rest of the world has sat up and noticed. If you read Gary Angel’s blogpost, you’ll see that Semphonic had “two handfuls” of offers (so I suppose that means in the neighborhood of ten?) They were in the enviable position of being able to choose their acquirer.

Best of luck to the Semphonic team on its new journey!

Robbin