Med-tech is off to a bold start this year with a hot acquisition, which will serve to consolidate the market.

Epocrates Inc., a medical applications company based in Silicon Valley, is being scooped up by AthenaHealth for $293 million. According to a company press release, AthenaHealth will pay $11.75 per share, a 22 percent premium to Epocrates’ Friday closing price.

Massachusetts-based AthenaHealth provides cloud-based services and tools to doctors and hospitals. The company faces fierce competition from Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Quality Systems, as well as Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, which is retooling after a protracted drama with its board. 

Epocrates is an attractive prospect for AthenaHealth, as it has built up brand-name recognition with doctors. AthenaHealth estimates that it is has been used by 338,000 U.S. physicians to pull up short summaries on drugs, including information about side effects and interactions.

“Capturing mindshare has been an uphill battle for Athena for years, and the addition of Epocrates to the platform is a step in the right direction,” said Greg Bolan, an analyst with Sterne Agee & Leach Inc, in an e-mail interview with Bloomberg.

The acquisition will help the company gain an iPhone app and expand into the lucrative electronic medical records (EMR) market.

“I have been an admirer of Epocrates since it first emerged and have watched the company grow consistently, one app download at a time, as it has cemented itself into the consciousness of America’s physicians,” said Jonathan Bush, the president and CEO of AthenaHealth in a statement. “Together, we’re excited by the opportunity to redefine the mobile toolset for care givers,” he added.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cisco Systems announced on its blog today that it will acquire Denver-based BroadHop for an undisclosed sum. The technology will be used to shape mobile data traffic and will be folded into Cisco’s service provider networking group.

According to Cisco’s VP of Corporate Business Development, Hilton Romanski, global IP traffic is projected to increase threefold in the next five years. For this reason, the networking giant had its eye on BroadHop, a policy control and service management technology for carrier networks that has been around since 2003. BroadHop is deployed by more than 70 wireline and mobile carriers around the world.

BroadHop has an open policy platform, which is designed to make it easier for service providers to control and monetize any service, regardless of whether the network has new or legacy components. In a nutshell, the technology allows a carrier to develop service tiers based on bandwidth or application.

According to Romanski, the technology will benefit Cisco’s service providers, as users will be incentivized to purchase ”customized premium service packages,” such as on-demand streaming.

The BroadHop team will report to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s software and applications group.

The networking giant acquired three companies last month — most recently, Cariden for $141 million in cash. In an interview with VentureBeat, Cisco’s cloud computing CTO Lew Tucker stressed that the company is always on the look-out for potential acquisition opportunities to bring innovation to its suite of products.

However, GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard pointed out, Cisco is not the first to jump on board the policy bandwagon. Aging giant Citrix whisked away Bytemobile earlier this year.