The consolidation fairy has struck again. <\/p>\n
SAP said late Tuesday that SAP America will be buying Ariba for about $4.3 billion, paying $45 a share, a 20% premium, for a company that had revenues of $443.9 million last year, up 38.5%. <\/p>\n
Ariba also reportedly has $196 million in the bank.<\/p>\n
Ariba\u2019s purchase price falls in between two big recent SAP purchases: the $5.8 billion it paid for the Sybase database in 2010 and the $3.4 billion it paid for SuccessFactors and its talent management widgetry late last year. Spending like it was Oracle, SAP paid $6.8 billion for French BI house Business Objects in 2007. <\/p>\n
SAP is going to use cash on hand and debt to pay for its new prize. The acquisition should be accretive in 2013.<\/p>\n
SAP is positioning Ariba\u2019s global B2B trading network as \u201ccollaboration-as-a-service\u201d or \u201cprocurement in the cloud.\u201d <\/p>\n
SAP\u2019s co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann said in a statement that \u201cCloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution.\u201d <\/p>\n
SAP figures Ariba\u2019s widgetry will ultimately benefit from its own real-time in-memory Hana platform.<\/p>\n
Ariba currently connects 730,000 companies, whose transactions are worth $319 billion. It expects Ariba to hit a million companies this year. It sees opportunities in China, South America and the Mid-East. <\/p>\n
Ariba will remain a free-standing subsidiary after the acquisition closes in Q3 with its network open to companies using Oracle and Microsoft software to connect. <\/p>\n
But SAP also said that together SAP and Ariba can deliver an end-to-end solution that enables companies to achieve a closed-loop from source-to-pay, regardless of whether they deploy in the cloud, on-premise or through a combination of both. <\/p>\n
The California concern, called the second-largest cloud vendor by revenue, has some 2,600 employees. Ariba CEO Bob Calderoni will be joining SAP\u2019s global managing board. He will run all of SAP\u2019s cloud-related supplier assets.<\/p>\n
SAP itself is expecting double-digit revenue growth this quarter and this year despite weakness in the mature markets. <\/p>\n
Oracle last month picked up SuccessFactors rival Taleo for $1.9 billion. <\/p>\n