Sterling Commerce to acquire Comergent Technologies, Inc.

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : 20 Nov 2006 19:43

DUBLIN, Ohio, Nov. 20, 2006 — In a move that the company hopes will extend Sterling’s supply chain leadership in manufacturing, retail, high-tech, automotive and aerospace.

Sterling Commerce, the multi-enterprise collaboration company and a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), today announced an agreement to acquire Comergent Technologies, Inc., a developer of eBusiness software, for approximately $155 million in cash. Sterling Commerce plans to incorporate Comergent products to provide customers with a unified end-to-end order fulfillment solution across the extended supply chain. This unified solution will enable customers to increase revenue, shorten sales and order fulfillment cycle times, and reduce overall supply chain costs.

“Comergent provides an enterprise suite of applications for managing selling and order management processes with customers and partners that will help Sterling Commerce act swiftly and broadly on some of our customers’ most pressing needs,” said Samuel Starr, president and CEO, Sterling Commerce. “By integrating Comergent’s eBusiness Application Suite into our multi-channel order fulfillment software, we plan to offer a modular end-to-end solution for the challenges that customers historically have handled through a complex and costly mix of point solutions.”

Headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., Comergent counts Affinia, Gates and Goodrich among its aerospace and automotive customers; Hayworth, Husky and Toro among its manufacturing customers; NEC, Quantum and Symbol among its high-tech customers; DIRECTV and Pearson Education as telecom and media customers and retail customers such as JC Penney and Best Buy For Business. Comergent’s eBusiness solution for the extended enterprise complements the Sterling Commerce solution for order orchestration across the supply chain. Comergent applications include a comprehensive set of order management capabilities ranging from account management to configuration to tools for guided sales, and support for customized proposals coupled with enterprise visibility into field quoting practices. Both Sterling Commerce and Comergent are built on services oriented architectures, allowing customers to incrementally adopt new capabilities as the market or customers dictate to form a comprehensive solution with a lower total cost of ownership.

“Both Comergent and Sterling Commerce share a vision for seamless supply chain execution – and today, the reality is that enterprises must sell broader offerings and reach new markets to grow their business and remain competitive,” said Jean Kovacs, president and CEO, Comergent Technologies, Inc. “Together, the respective strengths of our solutions will help enterprises respond to their growing customer and partner demands for optimized customer experience channel synchronization and reduced order fulfillment cycle times.”

Sterling Commerce plans to continue sales and support for Comergent products. The acquisition is subject to the expiration or early termination of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, and is expected to close shortly thereafter.

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