Twitter is officially acquiring tenXer, which will be shut down. The news was first reported by VentureBeat and then confirmed this morning by Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch, who cited tenXer cofounder and CEO Jeff Ma.
Twitter improves engineering tools
Twitter is interested in the engineering tools tenXer provides. The company’s platform enables engineers to work closely with developers. TenXer describes itself as helping “engineering leads be better managers” and delivering “the key views, stats and insights managers need to be effective and to help their teams be more productive” using the data produced by engineers each day through platforms like Pivotal, GitHub and others.
Ma reportedly told Lunden that they will be closing tenXer and continuing to do their work as a part of Twitter. That was the only comment he would say, referring her to Twitter, which is not yet providing any comments to the press. According to TechCrunch, an unnamed source said the purchase price was around $50 million.
All of the tenXer team will be moving to Twitter, and their work will reportedly be focused on Twitter’s own engineers. However, TechCrunch notes that at some point, Twitter may develop a platform for engineers outside the company.
What else could Twitter do with tenXer?
Lunden notes that Ma’s background is in predictive analytics, which is very helpful to Twitter notwithstanding the technology he developed. He uses this talent to focus mostly on predicting outcomes for sporting events for now.
Because of Ma’s background and the fact that tenXer’s platform will be used internally at Twitter, the acquisition of tenXer is clearly more of an acqui-hire. Twitter is understandably interested in predictive analytics because of the nature of its platform, so Ma’s talents can be used in more areas than just through the technology offered by tenXer.
Twitter continues developing new products
Twitter has been rapidly churning out new features and products, launching real-time search and filtering tool Curator this week. The nature of this tool alone could benefit from Ma’s talent and the talents of others at tenXer.
Other recently launched features by Twitter include Meerkat competitor Periscope.
As of this writing, shares of Twitter were down 0.53% to $50.20 per share.
