Sterling Commerce Buys Supply-Chain Software Maker For $170 Million

Sterling Commerce, which offers a variety of integration software and hosted electronic-trading-network services, will incorporate Yantra's application suite into its recently announced Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture, a supply-chain platform businesses can use to more closely collaborate with each other. The Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture is available as both a hosted service and standalone software.

Yantra's software is focused on inventory fulfillment, as opposed to replenishment, and is designed to give customers real-time visibility into business processes and events at the beginning of the process to help them manage orders, inventory, shipments, and financial transactions better, says Jim Hendrickson, VP of corporate development strategy at Sterling Commerce.

Yantra, headquartered in Tewksbury, Mass., was founded in 1995 as a privately owned spin-off of Infosys Technologies Ltd., which provides consulting and IT services to clients worldwide. Sterling Commerce says it will retain Yantra's approximate 250 employees and operate it as a new business division headed by Devdutt Yellurkar, Yantra's CEO.

Yantra executives had planned to take the company public in about two years until talks with Sterling Commerce began in May, Hendrickson says. "Through discussions with Yantra about our multienterprise strategy, we saw multiple synergies between the two companies," he says. "After a series of meetings, it was recommended to Yantra's board they be acquired by Sterling."

By September, Sterling had submitted a letter of intent to acquire Yantra. The deal is expected to close early in the first quarter of next year.