17
April
2013
|
10:26 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Intel Moves Into Media Technologies With Mashery Acquisition

Oren 1

Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery.

Intel is beefing up its software offerings with a reported acquisition of Mashery, based in San Francisco.

Owen Thomas at ReadWrite.com, broke the story:


Mashery's 125 employees are learning of the acquisition through a companywide email sent this morning... Intel likely paid two to three times Mashery's most recent valuation--a range of $120 million to $180 million. 


Mashery is expected to become part of Intel's services group, which focuses on data centers, where its server chips dominate the market.

The seven year old company has about 120 staff and it specializes in managing application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow customers to pull together different publishing streams from a variety of applications.

For example, media companies use Mashery to help them use APIs to publish content along with advertising networks and other media channels.

Media customers include New York Times, USA Today, CBS Interactive, Channel 4, Univision, Viddy, White Pages, Hoovers, Rdio, The Guardian newspaper, D&B, and Comcast. [Customer Verticals | Mashery.com]

Mashery's technology also has uses in wireless devices where it can be used to send data streams pared down for mobile devices, resulting in richer end-user experiences.

Intel is very interested in promoting the mobile device market, such as tablets and smart phones. Even though ARM, the UK microprocessor company dominates in those markets, smart devices help drive server sales where Intel's profits are the highest.

The acquisition will add to Intel's software business, which employs more software engineers than hardware engineers.