Features
Loudcloud agrees to sell most of its business to EDS
SAN FRANCISCO — In another sign of the high-tech industry’s humbling times, Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen abandoned his ambition to build a Web services giant Monday and agreed to sell most of his latest brainchild, Loudcloud Inc., to computer systems consultant Electronic Data Systems.
Plano, Texas-based EDS will pay $63.5 million in cash for Loudcloud’s primary business of managing and developing Web sites for other companies.
EDS also agreed to pay $52 million during the next three years to use a Loudcloud product called “Opsware” — software meant to automate information technology departments. Sunnyvale-based Loudcloud is changing its name to Opsware.
Monday’s sales price represents a small fraction of the $306 million that Andreessen and Loudcloud’s other co-founders have raised from investors since starting the company in September 1999.
