US imaging-software company ScanSoft has paid around $39.5m
(£27.67m) for the bulk of the assets of fallen Belgian software
developer Lernout & Hauspie (L&H).
ScanSoft acquired the major portion of L&H's core speech- and
language-technology business, including the text-to-speech and
speech-recognition engines and the Dragon NaturallySpeaking product
line.
The winning bid comprises $10m in cash, a $3.5m note and $26m in
ScanSoft stock. ScanSoft said it plans to retain at least 150
L&H employees in Belgium and the US.
ScanSoft, known for optical character recognition (OCR) products
such as OmniPage Pro, said it sees L&H as a good fit.
"ScanSoft and L&H are similar in a lot of ways. The research
that we do on OCR is much like research on speech recognition; our
people have similar mathematical backgrounds and our distribution
is comparable," said Michael Tivnan, president and chief operating
officer of ScanSoft.
ScanSoft, which has already licensed L&H's text-to-speech
engine for use in one of its products, is committed to L&H
customers and to developing the L&H product, Tivnan said.
"We value the customer base and it is our intent to keep all the
positive relationships. We are committed to moving the product
forward," he said. "Our first priority is to talk to the customers
and the distribution channel, hire the right people and make sure
there is no interruption in the service to the customer or the
channel."
Other remains of L&H, which was forced to seek bankruptcy
protection late last year, were also sold.
James and Janet Baker picked up L&H's audio search engine
technology assets, which they helped develop, for $750,000 through
a new company called Dragon Catalyst. They had previously sold
their company to L&H for $460m of now-worthless L&H
stock.
Multimodal Technologies, a company formed by the management of
L&H's ISI division, bought the company's remaining
speech-recognition products. L&H's Intelligent Content
Management and Knexys divisions were acquired by Vantage Technology
Holdings.
The asset sales are subject to final approval by the US Bankruptcy
Court for the District of Delaware and the commercial court in
Ieper, Belgium. The US court has scheduled a hearing for 4
December.