Sterling Commerce to Acquire Yantra Corporation

Sterling Commerce, a multi-enterprise collaboration company and wholly owned subsidiary of SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC), has agreed to purchase Yantra Corporation, the leading provider of distributed order management and supply chain fulfillment solutions, for approximately $170 million in cash. The transaction, expected to be complete by early first quarter 2005, is subject to regulatory review.

Sterling Commerce expects to retain all Yantra employees and operate the company as a new business division, headed by Devdutt Yellurkar, Yantra CEO. Yantras application suite will be incorporated into Sterling Commerces recently announced Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA). Both MESA and Yantra are built on standards-based technology platforms that extend the value of service-oriented architectures outside the enterprise with unparalleled security, scalability and performance. Sterling Commerce plans to offer the integrated set of composite applications both as a software solution and hosted service.

Sam Starr, president and CEO, Sterling Commerce, said: With this acquisition, we expect to deliver our first suite of composite applications to support our multi-enterprise collaboration strategy. The new product suite will help customers manage the end-to-end flow of orders, inventory, shipments and funds both inside and outside the organisation, with real-time visibility into business processes and events. And, the combination of our capabilities will create new composite applications.

Starr continued: Enterprises are demanding a way to remove the integration, collaboration and visibility barriers associated with multiple channels, multiple divisions and multi-tiered supply chains. The combination of Sterling Commerce and Yantras market-leading solutions will remove those barriers, offer better control of distributed supply chain processes across complex environments and allow companies to increase revenue and operate more efficiently.