In a move that will combine two of the world’s largest academic library solutions providers, on October 6 ProQuest signed an agreement to acquire Ex Libris Group from private equity firm Golden Gate Capital. Officials stated that ProQuest’s information resources and expertise in electronic resources management will pair well with Ex Libris’s library automation tools, combining to span “print, electronic, and digital content, as well as solutions for library management, discovery, and research workflows,” according to a joint announcement.
Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed “in the coming months,” were not disclosed. The combined company will form a distinct business unit called Ex Libris, a ProQuest Company, which will continue to be headquartered in Jerusalem and led by current Ex Libris CEO Matti Shem-Tov, with support from the existing Ex Libris management team and ProQuest’s Workflow Solutions division. Shem-Tov will report to ProQuest CEO Kurt Sanford.
In an interview with LJ, Sanford emphasized that ProQuest plans to continue investing in the support and development of all products owned by the combined company.
“This is consolidation in terms of corporate ownership only,” he said. “No products are going away. We’re maintaining them, we’re delivering on our roadmaps…. We’re going to continue not only to maintain, but to enhance or invest” in ProQuest and Ex Libris solutions. To illustrate the company’s approach to acquisitions, Sanford pointed to ProQuest’s recent track record with academic ebook platforms ebrary and EBL, which ProQuest acquired in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
“We said we would invest in ebrary, and we did. [Then] we bought EBL in 2013 because it had capabilities that ebrary didn’t have—the richness of its [patron driven acquisition] PDA and [demand driven acquisition] DDA business models,” Sanford said. “It had great tools for acquisitions and reporting, and we continued to invest in it…. We then created a next-generation solution [combining key elements from both platforms] called ProQuest Ebook Central…. I see this [acquisition of Ex Libris] doing the same thing. Let’s keep what we have, continue to invest in those products and honor the commitments that we have to our customers, take the capabilities of both companies and make existing products even better, and then build next-generation products and solutions that give customers even more choice.”
The combined company will continue to support Ex Libris products including the next-generation library management system (LMS) Alma, its traditional integrated library systems (ILS) Aleph and Voyager, its web-scale discovery solution Primo, its digital asset preservation solution Rosetta, its usage analytics platform bX, the OpenURL link resolver SFX, the newly launched Leganto reading list solution, and the recently acquired campusM mobile app solution.
Next-gen systems
Although the substantial product portfolios of the two companies mostly complement one another, Alma and Primo are two key instances of overlap with pre-existing products and initiatives at ProQuest. ProQuest offers the Summon discovery solution, and has been developing Intota, its proprietary LMS, for the past several years.
Intota Assessment, a collection analytics service designed to give libraries a holistic view of print and electronics collections together, was launched as a standalone module in November 2013. And at the American Library Association’s 2015 convention this summer in San Francisco, the company officially debuted Intota v2, which promises to leverage ProQuest’s discovery, linking, and assessment tools as a comprehensive management solution for both print and electronic resources. Unlike Ex Libris’s traditional Voyager ILS and Aleph ILS, Alma was also designed with comparable goals.
Sanford singled out Alma for praise in the official acquisition announcement, noting that “one great example of their expertise in action is the success of Ex Libris’ Alma unified resource management solution in helping hundreds of institutions worldwide improve their libraries’ value to their users.”
“It’s been no secret that libraries have been dealing with the pain of un-unified workflows for a long time,” Sanford told LJ. “The incumbent ILSes that are out there were designed in a day when almost all of the money libraries spent was for print or physical CD-ROMs. Twenty years later, almost all of the money they spend is on electronic or digital content, yet they’ve got legacy systems that were optimized for print and physical assets. Years ago we started building Intota trying to bring [our customers] unified workflows. We’ve always done our investments organically, but if we find a way through a transaction to accelerate time to market, or to close gaps and bring better solutions to the market faster, we’ll certainly take advantage of that.”
Sanford said that the goal will be to find ways in which these and other products can complement and build on one another, leveraging the strengths of the combined company.
“We see ourselves [at ProQuest] as particularly strong in Electronic Resource Management, we see ourselves as being very skilled and having expertise in knowledgebases, content indices, and metadata repositories,” Sanford said. When combined with Ex Libris’s expertise in ILS, LMS, and other automation solutions, “you end up with very complementary capabilities.”
Shem-Tov agreed, noting in the announcement that “the combined talent and expertise of ProQuest and Ex Libris will enable more efficient development and support of our leading solutions, and will accelerate innovation in both current and new products.”
Sanford added that ProQuest and Ex Libris plan to continue working collaboratively with other library vendors.
“We’ve been very clear, since I joined [as CEO in July 2011], that we believe in open systems, and we believe in collaboration…. Our customers have made investments [in content], they’ve picked the products that they wanted, and our job is to help them monetize those investments to make sure that research and scholarship is advanced.”