Engage, an Advertising, Marketing, and Promotion Management (AMP) vendor has risen from the wreckage of the Internet excess by clearing off its debt ($60M) from CMGI, the former Internet high flyer, and eliminating the 76% equity stake that CMGI held; all this for a few million dollars and warrants. Kudos to the Engage management team for negotiating this extraordinary restructuring. Engage remains a public company, but its largest shareholder has less than a 10% share, leaving Engage free to truly pursue AMP. The balance sheet has been cleaned up and steps have been taken through a cut in staff to reduce the burn rate.

John Barone, former senior vice president of sales and marketing, steps up into the president and COO role with plenty of experience in managing a software company through high growth and profitability. Lisa McAlister joins him in the CFO role. The management team at the top and in the middle has extensive experience in the software and advertising fields.

The multibillion-dollar AMP market will now be in the sights of a reasonably sized company with a solid number of retail clients in the advertising and catalog area. It brings industrial strength, digital asset, and content management capabilities along with applications for ad layout and ad planning to the market. It has several more pieces to fill in, such as price and promotion management, optimization capabilities, and store visual merchandising, but is leading with multiple multichannel retailers, such as LL Bean, Kohls, HEB, Sharper Image, and Sears Canada, that have catalogs, print ads, and Websites. Watch this space as other companies besides Engage continue to add the processes and applications to manage the $200B flow of monies from manufacturers through retailers to the end consumer.

Peter Abell