A Divine purchase: Northern Light Tech

Privately held Northern Light Technology LLC, Cambridge Mass., has been acquired by Chicago integrated solutions provider Divine Inc., the companies announced Jan. 22. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Divine will use Northern Light technologies to extend the range of Divine's content management and aggregation solutions, said Andrew Filipowski, Divine's chief executive officer.

Since its incorporation in 1995, Northern Light has developed enterprise-level search technology, a range of content services and an e-commerce transaction engine. For its search service, Northern Light catalogued more than 400 million Web sites.

In Jan. 16, it discontinued its public Web search service to concentrate its search capabilities on the enterprise market, where it had approximately 150 customers, according to David Seuss, ex-chief executive officer of Northern Light.

Northern Light will operate as the search and content division of Divine, and will continue to pursue government work such as the General Service Administration's $8 million FirstGov portal contract, said Seuss, now general manager for Divine's search and content division.

The GSA contract will provide an improved search engine to the FirstGov portal, and is expected to be awarded at the end of February.

On Jan. 7, Northern Light also signed an agreement with In-Q-Tel, a Central Intelligence Agency initiative that invests in companies developing new technologies, to customize a search solution for agency employees to search the Web for items of interest.

According to Seuss, 80 percent of Northern Light's 170 employees will be transferred to Divine.