Acquisition happy!

I spent much of today trying to find a way to write about today’s two pieces of news in a unifying, compare-and-contrast kind of way and I couldn’t come up with anything. Nada. In both cases, these acquisitions fill technology gaps for their buyers, but that’s the only commonality I could come up with — but they are in themselves very interesting deals that coincidentally happened today.

[Update: Martyn Day points out on Twitter that both deals are aimed at the consumer market. He’s absolutely right — though I’m not an expert at Alibre, I have to wonder how usable their parametric modeler is for the typical consumer. If you know, click on the comment link below to drop me an email.]

Read on:

First thing this morning Autodesk announced it was acquiring Pixlr, an online photo editing and sharing service. Pixlr is a 3 year old Swedish company that offers a number of cloud-based tools such as photo editors, browser extensions for screen grabs and photo sharing. These tools are typically used by people who are not professional photographers to create, edit, and share images via social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr and fit nicely into Autodesk’s offering for a consumer (as opposed to business or professional) audience.

Following almost immediately was the news that 3D Systems had bought Alibre. 3DS has been on a bit of a buying binge lately, gobbling up 17 businesses in 19 months. In May, CEO Abe Reichental told investors that “11 of the acquired companies were related to growing our custom parts services, one related to printer services, two enabled us to enhance our print engine platforms and three were related to our recently announced consumer growth initiative."

Perhaps more telling was what Mr. Reichental said at the time about CAD: "We have begun to work to identify the tools and infrastructure that is required to deliver what I consider intuitive, ready-to-use 3D content to audiences that are not CAD savvy. We already have all the expert users. It’s a very exclusive club. It’s yesterday’s sandbox. We’re looking to expand it and put it in the hands of people that are not designers and engineers. But they’re creators and makers, and they are just begging to find intuitive, user friendly ways to express themselves in 3D."

Alibre has many customers who use it to do sheet metal design — not exactly a rapid prototyping market-to-be. But 3DS says that the company intends to leverage the company’s installed base of hobbyists, inventors and small businesses by expanding the "breadth and reach of the Alibre design productivity tools and to leverage its combined global channels to deliver complete 3D design-to-manufacturing products, tools and services."

Terms were not disclosed for either deal.