Burlington, Massachusetts-based software engineering tools specialist Bachman Information Systems Inc has signed a letter of intent to acquire Cooperative Solutions Inc of San Jose: it appears that Bachman pays no money over, but gets substantially all the assets of the company in return for taking on some of its liabilities. Cooperative Solutions offers products that enable users to build and deploy production-quality client-server applications. Bachman is planning to continue development and support for Cooperative’s products in San Jose. Novell Inc was sufficiently impressed with Cooperative’s Ellipse development and run-time system that it bought into the company in the hope that it would provide a short cut to bringing mainframe applications down to NetWare client-server systems (CI No 1,834). Cooperative raised a total of $15m in venture funding, but the announcement from Bachman implies that that is now lost.
