When an entrepreneur succeeds to build, grow and sell a globally successful company, it can be called an extraordinary achievement. There is not many cases like that in the Central and Eastern Europe. If he or she succeeds to do it again, it makes him a star exceeding the dimensions of the region.
Recently we discussed here with Tarmo the Estonian team behind Kazaa (peer-to-peer system for sharing MP3 files) and Skype (acquired by eBay) that did it under Niklas Zennström (Swedish) and Janus Friis (Danish) management. I’m glad there is another success story, this time having roots in the Czech Republic.
A few days ago Mercury Interactive, US headquartered enterprise software company, signed a definitive agreement to acquire Systinet, for $105.0 million in cash. The founder is Roman Stanek who was the creator of NetBeans Java IDE, which he successfully sold to Sun Microsystems 6 years ago. Roman was our very first speaker at First Tuesday Prague in October 1999, later spoke at several more First Tuesday events and also put his own angel money into local companies. His visible example helped a lot in improving entrepreneurial climate in the country at that time, at least in the ICT sector.
Systinet is a leading provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance and lifecycle management software and services. Founded in 2000 in Prague, its products enable, publish, discover and manage SOA business services, and make it easy to build secure and reliable Web services with Java and C++ applications. More than 150 Global 2000 companies rely on Systinet technology, including Amazon.com, BMC Software, JPMorgan, Motorola, Defense Information Systems Agency, and Société Générale. Headquarters are in Massachusetts, USA and offices in Paris, Amsterdam and development operations in Prague.
Within the ETIF programme in Berlin we had a very interesting discussion in a small circle of VC funds representatives active in the CEE. It was moderated by the director of 3TS Capital Partners, one of the leading private equity firms in Central Europe. The TCEE Funds, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, concluded the first investment into Systinet in 2001 and participated also in further rounds of funding alongside other investors including Warburg Pincus, Esther Dyson and Windcrest Partners.
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