Little fleas

When I'm short of inspiration I look in my old copy of 'Verse and Worse' or one of my selections of Ogden Nash. Here goes:

little fleas have littler fleas
upon their backs to bite ‘em
and littler fleas have littler fleas
and so ad infinitum.

What's the relevance of this to IT investing?

Well, I was speaking to nCipher today, and it looks like they're becoming one of the littler fleas. They specialise in data security and encryption, and they are now finding that they can work very nicely together with the big consultancy firms. The big firms know they need to address their clients' security needs - but have no expertise in encryption. So nCipher is jumping in there, as a 'flea' on their host so to speak.

However, that's only part of their business. (They're doing well, incidentally - back in profit after a rocky passsage through the past couple of years, seeing revenues growing at 15.5% and getting some superb cash flow.)

I automatically thought of another 'flea' I've seen in the past - Ixos, a document management firm that had piggybacked its way to profitability on the back of SAP. And SAP, like a good big hedgehog, didn't mind IXOS hanging on its prickles - in fact it helped the smaller company with its marketing and expanded the cooperation into CRM as well as DM. Ixos was on Neuer Markt when I got to know it, but it was acquired by OpenText back in 2003.

So I'm going to go around and have a look for some more 'fleas'. I think it's a strategy more and more firms will be using in future. And it obviously can work pretty well.