Divine Buys Northern Light TechnologyDivine Buys Northern Light Technology

Internet technology service provider divine Inc. has bought the search and content-integration units of online search firm Northern Light Technology LLC in an all-stock deal. Neither the value nor terms of the deal were disclosed.

Divine bought, among other assets, Northern Light's content-and-search technology, including Special Collection, an online business library of more 70 million pages of articles from newspapers and trade journals, and RivalEye, a news retrieval and alert service that uses data from Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other sources to gather information, such as customer wins and marketing initiatives, about a company's competitors. Divine plans to integrate Northern Light's fee-based content into its collaboration and content-management applications. Both companies identified 18 products they can integrate right away, Northern Light CEO David Seuss said during a conference call Tuesday. Seuss said about 80% of Northern Light's employees will move to divine, including chief technology officer Marc Krellenstein and senior VP of content development Robert Nelson.

Search functions fit well with divine's content-management apps and portals, Gartner analyst Lou Latham says. If divine successfully integrates Northern Light's technology across all of its acquired businesses--including its instant-messaging business--Latham says, "You could look for everything having to do with E-commerce." Not only would customers get documents about E-commerce, but they "could get a list of people that can answer your questions," he says.

Web portal company Yahoo Inc. is expected to be the first customer of the combined fee-based search service. In addition to putting some free divine content on its Web site, Yahoo is expected to let customers read articles from more than 7,100 periodicals for a fee of less than $5.

As of Jan. 16, Northern Light ceased offering free content on its site and planned to seek its own fee-paying customers. Shares of divine, which is trading at less than $1, closed up 13.9%, to 82 cents Tuesday.