Mediasurface float a success

Web content management provider Mediasurface has floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange for £9.2m. Despite unfavourable stock market conditions, the company raised £2m more than it was valued at prior to floating. Its price rose from a starting-point of 12p to 13.25p on Friday after two days of trading.

UK-based Mediasurface hit on hard times a few years ago, with losses of £23.3m in 2001. Ovum analyst Sarah Kittmer said the future is now looking brighter for Mediasurface and other providers of Web content management systems (CMS).

"The Web CMS market suffered very severely with the collapse of the dot-com market," said Kittmer. "Mediasurface had a bad patch, but this was consistent with the rest of the industry. The Web CMS market is now doing ok."

But the CMS market is unlikely to hit the heights that other parts of the software industry have reached, said Kittmer. "It is one of the markets that has been for ages teetering on the edge of going big time. But I don't think it ever will."

The news of Mediasurface's flotation comes in the same week as IBM announced its acquisition of CMS vendor Venetica. A few weeks earlier content management provider Open Text acquired Artesia, a smaller provider which specialises in managing multimedia content.

There has been a lot of consolidation in the marketplace over the last year, said Kittmer. "Lots of smaller vendors have being Hoovered up by larger companies," she said. She believes this is unlikely to happen to Mediasurface as most large CMS vendors already have Web content management capability.