Guardian sells tech money tracker Kable to Danson’s PDMG

Five years after it acquired public-sector technology research firm Kable (here was our story), Guardian News & Media (GNM) is off-loading the outfit.

The firm, which tracks local government’s technology expenditure plans for suppliers hunting contracts, is passing to Progressive Digital Media Group (PDMG), the vehicle through which Datamonitor founder Mike Danson has been building a business intelligence publishing firm since selling Datamonitor to Informa in 2007.

PDMG, which also owns New Statesman and Press Gazette, says the acquisition “is in line with PDMG’s stated strategy of growing its exposure to subscription-based content revenue streams“, in a short announcement. Deal terms are not announced, despite PDMG being publicly-listed.

Kable has been going since 1990 and published titles including Government Computing and Smart Healthcare.

GNM, keen on growing in to B2B media, was attracted by its coverage of the public sector and its events portfolio, and in 2007 purchased Kable for its new Guardian Professional division. A year later, GNM acquired paidContent publisher ContentNext for the same division but in 2012  sold ContentNext to GigaOM.

GNM is nowadays focused on building its efforts under its own brand and on consumer-facing content rather than specialist B2B. But it has retained a growing interest in specialist verticals in the new guise of its “Professional Networks“. Just as GNM now operates a Media Network in ContentNext’s space, it also publishes Government Computing, Healthcare Network and Local Government in Kable’s. Guardian Media Group is also selling GMG Radio to Global Radio.

In the last few years, Kable has transitioned from publishing freely-available coverage to offering premium material to customers only.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in our parent company, Giga Omni Media.