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December 1999, Vol. 16, No. 11 & 12 |
Belgian buying binge, part 2...
L&H prepares for creation of separate legal entities
After "gobbling up" several Belgian development firms earlier this year (see ISR, June/July 1999), speech and linguistic technology powerhouse Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) (Ieper, Belgium and Burlington, Mass.; www.lhsl.com) has entered into another round of acquisitions and agreements. This time the activity centers around the imminent creation of separate legal entities for two of its key business units: Healthcare Solutions and Globalization and Internet Translation. L&H plans to follow this by preparing its Enterprise and Telephony Solutions group for separation status as well.
According to the company, these moves have helped put its Globalization and Internet Translation and Healthcare Solutions units in a position to begin operating separately as early as Q1 2000.
A healthy Healthcare Solutions Group
During the past year, L&H's Healthcare Solutions Group has been developing and acquiring resources in order to create a technology-enhanced enterprise dictation and transcription solution for the healthcare industry. The company announced that it has either acquired or signed agreements to purchase additional medical industry assets and technologies. These include:
L&H expects to integrate these assets with its own core speech and language technologies, including its PowerScribe integrated dictation solution and its natural language technology, to create a technology-enhanced solution to improve the overall medical dictation and transcription process.
The three acquisitions will cost approximately $40 million, with additional potential earnouts of up to approximately $9 million. It expects the acquisitions will be neutral to its earnings per share for 2000 and accretive in the years beyond 2000.
Agreements and service expansion to bolster Internet translation business
L&H also completed a number of transactions to improve its position in the globalization and Internet translation market. Possibly one of the most promising steps is a recent agreement with Microsoft under which its Internet translation services will be available through the Office Update web site (www.officeupdate.com), providing both machine and human translation services. The agreement gives L&H an opportunity to tap into millions of new potential customers to whom it can sell not only Internet translation, but also its full family of translation and localization services.
The company also recently announced its intentions to provide its own online translation services and has penned agreements with a number of other Internet service providers (ISPs) to offer L&H iTranslator through their sites. The services the company expects to offer include limited free machine or "gist" translations for documents up to one page in length. Customers with documents greater than one page in length and those requiring human translation only, or machine translation supplemented by human translation may choose from a wide variety of options at various pricing levels.
L&H plans to make additional investments in this entity to continue expanding its offerings.
Next up: Telephony and Enterprise Solutions
L&H recently opened a customer support and service center designed to support application development for telephony and the enterprise. It has a full suite of telephony solutions with its family of text-to-speech (TTS) technologies, including the recently announced L&H RealSpeak natural sounding TTS, as well as large and small vocabulary recognizer engines and dialogue systems.
These solutions are available for a variety of platforms, languages and environments. They are deployed by telephony developers and vendors to voice-enable call centers, interactive voice response applications and other telephone-based services.
An expanding customer-base doesn't hurt, either
Along with the acquisitions and agreements, L&H announced several deals with customers in various markets. L&H cited demand for its speech and language technologies and solutions in the Asia Pacific region. L&H also announced a number of licensing agreements with companies in Europe focusing on the telecommunications and embedded markets. Among the solutions are dialogue systems that provide customers with a fast, simple and convenient way to access information, as well as embedded speech engines and language technologies. The signed contracts include: Hyundai Securities, Samsung Securities, LG Securities, Daishin Securities, Daewoo Securities, EPC Asia, IBCC (International Business Computer Co., Ltd.), NeoTelecom, LG Electronics, Intelligent Communications, SoftTech Advantage, Softel Telecommunications Pte Limited, Delfi, Intellex, GenSoft, Enter, and others.
These agreements follow recently announced deals in the US with Periphonics Corporation, Xypoint, KeyVoice Technologies and other companies.
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