Sterling Commerce Buys Yantra for $170 Million

Furthering its mission to provide collaboration and integration software and services to its vast EDI (electronic data interchange) customer base, Sterling Commerce announced today the acquisition of Yantra Corp. for $170 million in cash.

The transaction, pending review, is expected to be complete in the first quarter of 2005.

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Yantra develops distributed order management and supply chain fulfillment software. Through its Business Process Platform, it also furthers Sterlings approach to providing its users the functionality of a service-oriented architecture.

In November, Sterling announced its Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture, or MESA, which enables process collaboration between trading partners. Yantras application suite, 7x, provides a number of capabilities, including distributed order management, supply collaboration, inventory synchronization, reverse logistics and delivery and service scheduling. The companys Business Process Platform enables the applications to manage internal and external supply chain processes.

With the acquisition, Yantras software will be incorporated into Sterlings MESA and become available as stand-alone software, or as a hosted service. The integrated suite is expected to help Sterling users better manage the flow of orders, inventory, shipments and funds internally and externally, officials said.

Not much will change at Yantra, of Tewksbury, Mass. Sterling, of Columbus, Ohio, will retain Yantras entire employee base and operate the company as a new business division headed by Yantras current CEO, Devdutt Yellurkar.

The Yantra acquisition is Sterlings second this year. In April the company acquired TR2, which makes data cleansing and synchronization software. That acquisition brought Sterling, a subsidiary of telecommunications giant SBC Communications Inc., product information management capabilities—a key area as companies look to better communicate along their supply chain.

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