Command Information Slips in a Small “Expansion” Round. 10/11/2009 Private Placement. Command Information of Alexandria burst onto the local scene in 2006 with an eye-popping $32M from Novak Biddle, Paladin, Carlyle and Blue Water. It announced an ambitious program, starting from scratch, to become the leader in spreading the new IPv6 Internet protocol throughout government and beyond. It jumped out of the blocks with the purchase of Digital Focus. Many of us at the time were curious how a company could arrange itself to capitalize on a standard. We were not sure what precedents there were in the tech world, unless you owned a portion of the technology (e.g., Qualcomm and CDMA). Still, figuring these things out is why the investors make the big money. Several CEOs later, several years later, and several investment rounds later, the company is still soldiering forward. This latest round came in an SEC filing, unheralded. Our guess is that the lack of a definable or harvestable IPv6 market has forced the company to morph into more of a traditional IT services company commonly found in the region. Current offerings include reasonably hot but more pedestrian offerings of cyber security, information assurance and network engineering alongside the IPv6 tag line. The way to make money with traditional, low margin IT Services is to limit your initial and on-going investment dollars while capitalizing on growth. It’s not clear how these locally based funds will ever see a return on what started out as an ambitious investment in Command Information. Our guess is that there is a “game changing” merger lurking out there somewhere.
