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However, the question for many investors is whether Idion paid too much, given that non-executive director Marius Vlok -- father of CE Nicolaas Vlok -- resigned because he disagreed with the price and strategy of the US acquisition?

Leading industry analysts seem to think not and also say that the rift between Vlok senior and his son has been misrepresented. Nicolaas Vlok says that his father's main concern was the timing of the deal rather than the acquisition itself. Vlok senior felt that Idion was possibly rushing ahead of itself and should have waited up to a year developing its business before making such a major acquisition.

SA and international institutions seemed to disagree if the demand for the 26,5m shares Idion placed in the market to fund the deal is anything to go by. Vlok junior says that the placement was heavily oversubscribed, even though the public disagreement with his father broke during the road show. In fact, he says, one London-based institution was extremely impressed with the company's transparency.

But it's easy to sympathise with Vlok senior's view given how many businesses fail because they expanded too fast. But, this is a fast moving industry, as one analyst points out, and you have to take your chances when they arise. ``If you snooze, you lose,'' he says. The numbers certainly look good. Idion was forecasting earnings of 40c a share for the year ahead before the acquisition, but the acquisition has boosted this to around 50c a share despite the dilutionary effect of the extra shares in issue.

One can't help but notice the excitement many top analysts feel, for this company is not at all dissimilar to Ixchange in the early days. To understand this, one has to understand Idion's business.

In IT jargon, Idion competes in the arena of ``enterprise information availability''. What does this mean?

Simply put, Idion writes and markets software which ensures that an organisation's computer system is always available. In the past, an organisation's computer system was more than likely housed on only one computer. If that computer failed for any reason, business stopped until the problem could be sorted out.

The way one gets around that problem, is to operate the business's computer system on a cluster of computers. That way, the organisation's computer system continues to run seamlessly even if one of the computers in the cluster fails.

Essentially, Idion's software manages this cluster of computers and allows applications designed to run on only one computer to run on many computers. Currently, Idion's software can now connect 128 machines.

Vision Solutions operates in much the same arena, but provides a different, complementary product (high availability and replication technology). Furthermore, Vision Solutions has a worldwide distribution network, including IBM.

If this still sounds too technical, look at the numbers. Leading US research group Gartner/Dataquest estimates that the ``continuous availability'' market is worth some $35bn in a year's time, one- third of which will be spent on the relevant software. The combined business is very well positioned to become a dominant leader in this emerging software technology.

Business organisations are more than happy to pay the price if one considers the risk attached to systems failure. Another US research group, Fibre Channel, estimates that it would cost a US brokerage house $6,5m an hour for a systems failure, or $2,6m an hour for a credit card processing business.

Market reaction to technology failures of Internet companies can be dire. When US online auction site E-Bay crashed 18 months ago, their stock slumped 21% in four hours.

Quoting from a Gartner/Dataquest report, creating a available computer environment is vital as the Internet continues to become the medium that companies use to conduct business. ``Not only do companies need to make front-office and back-office applications available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but now with electronic commerce any system downtime cannot be tolerated. To create these new computing infrastructures, companies will leverage clustering solutions to eliminate single points of failure and increase overall availability of the computing environment.''

But back to Idion. Vlok says Vision Solutions' $1,7m attributable loss for financial 1999 is not cause for concern. He notes that the loss at Vision Solutions was related to the restructuring of its distribution channel, as well as heavy R&D spending. Despite the full- year loss, the company recorded profits in the last two quarters of last year, and had already broken even halfway through the first quarter of this year.

Perhaps more to the point, the Vision Solutions founders have guaranteed after tax earnings of $3m for the current year and have bound themselves to use funds held in trust to buy Idion stock should they meet their target. This represents most of the proceeds of the sale after their venture capital partners and the US taxman have taken their cut.

These are the issues which are exciting industry analysts. And, while the public disagreement over the company's strategy has depressed the stock, three of the analysts Finance Week spoke to believed it represented an ``excellent opportunity to buy into weakness.''