Accelerating innovation and supporting choice for libraries worldwide

This is a blog post from ProQuest CEO Matti Shem Tov.

When ProQuest and Ex Libris announced the acquisition of Innovative, we believed we could accelerate the pace of innovation in our industry and create new and better options for libraries.

As you may have seen recently in the blog from Yariv Kursh, the new General Manager of Innovative, we are focused on developing and releasing requested Sierra and Polaris features and functions that bring you immediate value. This includes extending Polaris Leap capabilities across workflows and improving staff workflows and usability in Sierra. We also plan to deliver a SaaS platform for public libraries enabling you to strengthen engagement with your communities.

We’re excited about these new developments. At the same time, we are holding off on some other integration plans. As is typical with many merger and acquisition transactions in the United States, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) routinely evaluates the potential impact on competition and customers, and we received a formal notification of a review of the acquisition of Innovative. We remain confident that the acquisition will positively impact the industry and increase choice for libraries worldwide. We are working with the relevant parties and hope to be through this process soon.

As we communicated at the time, our goal is to combine Innovative’s expertise with Ex Libris’ leading cloud technologies to develop cloud-based SaaS solutions. With Innovative’s experience in resource sharing and metadata services we will accelerate the development of solutions that help customers thrive in today’s changing library environment. Ultimately this will enable us to offer real choice for the first time to academic, public, and special libraries for both resource sharing and metadata services.

As we move forward, we reiterate our commitment that there will be no disruption to your library operations. Innovative continues to operate independently and its customers should continue to engage with the Innovative team as you always have. As we shared when the acquisition closed, Innovative’s solutions will continue to be sold, supported, and developed. In addition, Ex Libris remains focused on the execution of its vision for academic institutions. Both companies also remain committed to working with partners, vendors, and user groups across the industry.

We are fortunate to be in an industry where libraries have many outstanding choices across technology companies, content providers, and service providers. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with our customers, partners and the user community to create choice and accelerate innovation in library technology and will continue to keep you updated.