The Active Network Stops for Overhaul Following a Decade of Acquisitions
its legacy software as a service infrastructure with a more sophisticated SAAS architecture. The new software technology will establish a common approach for many billing, financial, and back-office functions, while also giving The Active Network more flexibility to rapidly develop software tools for a new customer and to expand the capabilities of customers with high-demand events. He estimates the cost of the
Dave Alberga
four-year development effort at $80 million to $90 million, and calls it “a very, very big spend, especially at a time when the economy is through the floor.”
The project makes sense, especially for an Internet company that has made roughly 50 acquisitions of varying sizes since it was founded in 1998. Or, as Alberga puts it, “It feels like we’ve ingested a lot and now we need to be doing some digesting.”
He explains, “Of the technologies we’ve built from the ground up, much of it is 10 years old now, and much of what we acquired is older than that. We need to start all over, hit reset, and take this services-based approach to the infrastructure.”
Alberga says the company has added “hundreds of developers, who are working exclusively on the project,” which is headed by
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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