{smartassembly} wins the Red Gate million dollar challenge

Back in April I blogged about the Red Gate million dollar challenge. Red Gate is fortunate enough to be profitable and have money in the bank. We've bought companies in the past, and it felt like a good time to do it again. Finding great companies is hard, and we're lazy, so we set up a honey pot. A million dollar honey pot.

Some fifty companies entered. We narrowed it down to a handful over the course of a couple of months, and then to a single company. About a month ago we formally offered to purchase {smartassembly} from Jean-Sébastien Lange (for an amount I can't disclose). Jean-Sébastien negotiated hard and successfully, and then accepted. It took a few weeks to sort out all the legals, but now it's official.

We bought {smartassembly} for a number of reasons:

• It's an awesome product. It takes .net assemblies and applications, merges dependencies, obfuscates and provides exception logging for unhandled errors
• It's making money. It's a mature product, and has proven the market that it's in
• It fits in well with the other .NET tools we have
• It has a lot of potential. It's successful already, but we're hoping that Red Gate can develop it further and encourage even more people to use it.
• Jean-Sébastien is somebody we can work with. He's smart, friendly and laid back. Life is too short to work with people you don't get on with

For now, we're going to run {smartassembly} from its own web site. We've got it building on our servers in Cambridge, but we'll figure out how to integrate it into Red Gate properly over the next few months.

You can find out more about {smartassembly} on its web site. We'll do an official press release tomorrow.

Enjoyed this post? Follow me on Twitter (I'm @neildavidson)

Subscribe to the RSS feed

Comments

[dorin]

gratz on the purchase, hope {sa} will continue to be a great product or maybe an even better one :)