Intergraph Corp said yesterday that it was looking for a buyer for its InterCAP Graphics Systems Inc subsidiary. InterCAP, which was founded in 1987, was acquired by Intergraph in 1994 in the days when Intergraph was interested in entering the electronic publishing business. The struggling Huntsville, Alabama-based company has since retreated to focus on its core workstation business and its lawsuit with Intel Corp. InterCAP developed the technology behind the CGM Computer Graphics Metafile ISO standard for vector and composite vector/raster picture definition, still widely used in technical illustration circles by large companies such as Boeing Corp, General Electric Co, Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman, and the US Department of Defense. The CGM Open Consortium is currently working on a proposed WebCGM standard with the World Wide Web Consortium. InterCAP’s best known product is the MetaLink Runtime CGM viewer and browser, but it also sells technical illustration software such as Illustrator2 and QuikEdit. The company remained at its original Annapolis, Maryland headquarters, and according to Intergraph is both profitable and showing strong revenue growth of 50% year over year. We’re talking to potential partners for InterCAP with a similar focus on multi-platform, standards-based solutions for Web-publishing technical information. One candidate that immediately springs to mind is Boston, Massachusetts-based Inso Corp, another member of the WebCGM group, which has been very actively acquiring companies over the last year. Intergraph has retained Sall Advisors Inc of Miami, Florida to advise with the sale. Rumors that both IBM Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc were potential buyers of Intergraph itself last month have so far come to nothing.
