According to a press release on domaintools.com  today,  the long rumored acquistion by Thought Convergence, which owns and operates Trafficz, of Name Intelligence, which operates DomainTools.com and the Domain Roundtable conference was confirmed.

“We are proud to welcome Jay, Ray and the entire Name Intelligence team into the Thought Convergence family”, said Kevin Vo, Thought Convergence Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The addition of Name Intelligence further strengthens our industry leading technology platform and lays the groundwork for the continuing expansion of our comprehensive suite of tools and services for domain professionals. Further commenting on the acquisition, Thought Convergence Director and Chief Operating Officer, Ammar Kubba, added that “Name Intelligence shares our passion and drive to create technology-driven solutions and innovation within the domain industry. By combining our award-winning monetization and development platform, deep industry relationships and extensive resources with Name Intelligence’s unparalleled research, analysis and data aggregation tools, we are putting into place a robust and scalable framework for the creation of a symbiotic Domain Ecosystem.”

In commenting on the close of the transaction, Jay Westerdal, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Name Intelligence, said, “We are incredibly excited to join forces with Thought Convergence and to leverage our core competencies and proprietary technology in order to create the next generation of DomainTools, our auction and marketplace platform, intellectual property protection services, and semantic suggestion technology.” Name Intelligence operations will remain in Seattle, Washington, and will continue to be led by Jay Westerdal and Ray Bero. In addition to their responsibilities at Name Intelligence, both Westerdal and Bero will collaborate with senior management at Thought Convergence to develop and execute on the Company’s long-term strategy.

The immediate questions now are will Trafficz continue to be the main sponsor of TRAFFIC now that is owner of a competing conference?  Will the Domain Round Table have more than one major show scheduled each year?

The rumored price which was not discussed in the press release was in the area of 16 million dollars.