TRG Licenses DART Terminal Usage Tracking Capabilities from Vela

Originally developed by Harco Technology, which was acquired by Wombat Financial Software and merged into NYSE Technologies before being spun out and sold to then-SR Labs (which rebranded as Vela), DART provides in-depth usage tracking for data terminal products. TRG’s ResearchMonitor service provides a similar usage tracking capability for web-based subscription content.

TRG plans to integrate DART with its FITS inventory management system, and the InfoMatch spend and contract management system acquired with the vendor’s recent purchase of Dutch rival Screen Group, enabling users to view DART reports and run usage analytics from within both platforms.

“A lot of our clients had been saying for some time that they want us to go into more depth around usage tracking. So our strategy this year and beyond is to go deeper and do more around usage analysis. FITS and InfoMatch show you what you’ve got and who has it. Then DART and ResearchMonitor show how that is being used,” says Leigh Walters, chief revenue officer at TRG. “It would have taken a long time to build something new that was as robust as DART. Partnering [to license DART itself] is a lot faster and easier.”

Another potential benefit is that because DART and ResearchMonitor are both rolled out to clients by deploying a software agent on users’ desktops, there’s no reason that both couldn’t be installed at the same time, even though the agents would be interacting with different hosts—TRG for ResearchMonitor and Vela for DART—Walters says.

Under the terms of the deal, TRG will run sales and relationship management for new business, while Vela will maintain existing client relationships and perform after-sales support and development—though TRG will now be actively involved in collecting client feedback and contributing ideas to DART’s development roadmap.

“We’ve had DART for a number of years. It has been a success for us, and we’re committed to it as a product. But with our own acquisitions last year in areas around market access, we felt the DART message might get lost, and that we wouldn’t be able to do it justice,” says Ollie Cadman, head of business operations at Vela. “But when you put it together with what TRG can offer across the spend management space… it makes a stronger proposition overall.”

However, Vela will retain all rights to the related but separate DART Entitlements system. “They share the same name, but are completely different products,” Cadman says. “As probably the leader in the feed handler and caching space, all our feed handers and the platforms we’ve inherited continue to need a strong entitlements solution at their center.”