Sterling Commerce Acquires Yantra Corporation

12/20/2004

Sterling Commerce, a multi-enterprise collaboration company and wholly owned subsidiary of SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC), reported their purchase of Yantra Corporation, a provider of distributed order management and supply chain fulfillment solutions, for approximately $170 million in cash.

Sterling Commerce expects to retain all Yantra employees and operate the company as a new business division, headed by Devdutt Yellurkar, Yantra's CEO. Yantra’s application suite will be incorporated into Sterling Commerce’s 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, Sterling said. “With this acquisition, we expect to deliver our first suite of composite applications to support our multi-enterprise collaboration strategy,” said Sam Starr, president and CEO of Sterling Commerce. “The new product suite will help customers manage the end-to-end flow of orders, inventory, shipments and funds both inside and outside the organization, with real-time visibility into business processes and events. And, the combination of our capabilities will create new composite applications.”

“Enterprises are demanding a way to remove the integration, collaboration and visibility barriers associated with multiple channels, multiple divisions and multi-tiered supply chains,” said Starr. “The combination of Sterling Commerce and Yantra’s 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.” Yantra was founded in 1995 as a privately owned spin-off of Infosys Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: INFY), which provides consulting and IT services to clients worldwide. Yantra is headquartered in Tewksbury, Mass., a suburb of Boston, with offices in Duluth, Ga.; Redwood City, Calif.; Naperville, Ill.; Berkshire, U.K.; and Bangalore, India. The company employs more than 250 people.

“The Yantra applications were purpose-built to pull together the dynamic and complex processes associated with warehousing, distributed order management, supply chain visibility and product information management,” said Yellurkar. “When coupled with Sterling Commerce’s services-oriented architecture that was built for data synchronization and collaboration outside the firewall, the new combined supply chain solutions will offer users the best fulfillment and event management functionality in the industry.”

SBC Chairman and CEO Edward E. Whitacre Jr. said that the pending acquisition was another positive step forward in the company’s growth strategy, which includes mergers and acquisitions and organic growth.

“Through transactions such as Cingular Wireless’ acquisition of AT&T Wireless, our joint purchase with BellSouth of YellowPages.com, our continued collaborations with Yahoo! and Echostar and now Sterling Commerce’s acquisition of Yantra, we continue to build the resources, specialized capabilities and scale we need to serve our customers and create value for shareholders. We will continue to develop our business both organically through investment and through acquisitions like those we have made this year and in the past. We’ll look for opportunities that make strategic and financial sense for our company and our shareholders – and help us better serve our customers and differentiate us from competitors,” said Whitacre

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