Hi, All.   Just heard about this.  Has anyone else heard the same thing?

>From LJ Academic Newswire...

SirsiDynix Bought by Private Firm

SirsiDynix, the leading automation vendor used by public, academic, and
school libraries, announced that it will be acquired by Vista Equity
Partners, a $1 billion private equity firm that focuses on investing in
software and technology businesses. The deal marks yet another ownership
milestone for the company: Sirsi and Dynix, once competitors, merged in
June 2005. Lebron Miles, a spokesman for SirsiDynix, said there are no
current plans to change the SirsiDynix name. "We do not expect our
customers to see any difference in our services," Miles added, noting
that the deal is expected to become final in mid-January following a
regulatory review.

For San Francisco-based Vista, the acquisition is its first investment
the library market. Vista founder and managing principal Robert Smith
described Vista as "long-term investors in technology companies
committed to market leadership," and said he was excited about working
with SirsiDynix because it is "clearly the market leader, with a suite
of mission-critical software solutions." While SirsiDynix's Miles said
little would change with the deal, on his Coffee/Code blog
<http://www.coffeecode.net/archives/108-Musing-about-SirsiDynixs-new-inv
estment-partner.html> , Dan Scott, systems librarian for Laurentian
University, Sudbury, ON, warned that the merger could lead to "increased
fees for service and annual support, the phasing out of the Unicorn
system, even another potential merger or acquisition in 2008."

Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research for
the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University and author
of LJ's annual automation marketplace article, said SirsiDynix wasn't on
the block because its owners, Seaport Capitol, weren't making profits.
Rather, their investment had hit its time horizon. Vista, he said, has a
longer time horizon, and thus approaches the purchase from the belief
that it can ultimately build a company of higher value, without needing
to raise prices in the short term beyond the increases that would have
occurred anyway. "While the company's Horizon and Unicorn systems are
due to merge in the long-term, the company isn't going to develop two
parallel products forever-both have such large customer bases that
abrupt change would cost them customers," he told the LJ Academic
Newswire. "But the ILS isn't the most important piece of the pie,"
Breeding added, pointing to the company's challenge in helping libraries
manage electronic content, "and SirsiDynix is weak on that front now."
While he didn't predict that Vista would go out and purchase another ILS
vendor, "there may be other synergies, such as buying a related
company."