So Keane, Inc. is being acquired by a Japanese firm: NTT Data for $1.2B. Just 3 years ago (in February 2007), Keane had been acquired for $845M by Caritor, a global organization based in San Ramon, Calif., with a solid track record in offshore IT development. Not a bad profit in 3 years for Caritor CEO Mani Subramanian!
Keane actually is comprised of two parts: a Boston-based generic IT industry giant with about 1K employees that does programming, outsourcing, etc. They’re so big, they were one of the firms that manned the 800 phone lines for Bill Gates’ release of Windows 95. The “Health Services Division” (HSD) is a smaller outfit with about 250 FTEs based in Long Island, founded by Ray Paris, an early McAuto heavy (doesn’t “HSD” sound familiar?).
What’s it mean to a CIO? Plenty, if you’re one of the hundreds of hospital clients (or thousands of Long Term Care system users) using one of Keane’s many products:
- Optimum – a brand new packaging (announced in 2009) comprised of pieces of their other products defined in detail below: iMed EMR, PatCom revenue cycle and ORMED as a partner for ERP (AP, GL, Materials, etc.). Being implemented at a handful of pilot sites.
- iMed – an EMR & CPOE clinical suite, one of the first to obtain preliminary stage 1 certification by CCHIT in August of 2010. Under development for many years, iMed is one of the few vendor-developed EMRs in this flurry of M&A activity (viz: NextGen buying Opus, and AllScripts buying Eclipsys). iMed’s modern Java and .Net architecture demos very well.
- PatCom – aka “easy Access,” a leading revenue cycle product, acquired by Keane from PHS (Professional Hospital Services), installed in about 60 hospitals, including such prestigious names as Johns Hopkins and Mass. General. Originally written for a DG platform, it has been modernized for servers and boasts powerful RCM functionality.
- First Coast – aka “InSight,” an IBM AS/400 (RPG) product acquired by Keane from its Florida owner, with fairly full clinicals & financials, targeted to smaller hospitals, running in about 100 hospitals, and sunset in 2009 when Optimum was announced.
- NetSolutions – a leading (if not the leading!) Long Term Care system, with over 2,500 clients, acquired from Ferranti in the ‘90s (another “offshore” conglomerate, this one from Italy), who had acquired it from US-based Pentamation, headquartered in MD.
What’s the prognosis for the many Keane clients?
UPSIDE: Could be just as positive as Siemens acquisition of SMS, which provided deep pockets full of Deutsche Marks to fund and complete the development of Soarian, or McKesson’s acquisition of HBOC, which funded the completion of Paragon.
DOWNSIDE: Two acquisitions in three years means a lot of management changes, as well as a triple shift in “corporate culture.” Did Siemens lose some of the old “King of Prussia” culture in terms of client service? Has McKesson ended HBOC’s “acquisition-mania”?
Only time will tell, but one hopes the deep-pocketed Japanese owners of NTT have a yen (sorry!) to finish Optimum and sell it to the many PatCom and First Coast clients. With a proud history going back many decades, we wish NTT and the many Keane clients well.
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