Borland Software on Wednesday shelled out $24 million in cash to gobble up
Santa Ana, Calif.-based Starbase Corp. , a deal that
gives Borland a bigger bite of the market for Web applications.
The deal calls for Borland to acquire all of the
outstanding shares of Starbase at $2.75 per share, almost $2.00 per share
more than Starbase’s 80 cents closing price on Tuesday. In today’s early
going, Starbase stock jumped a whopping 235 percent on news of the
acquisition as shareholders roundly applauded the move.
Borland, which has emerged as the dark
horse in the Application Server market share race, also agreed to
provide $2 million in bridge financing to fund Starbase through the
completion of the merger.
Once the deal gets regulatory approval, Borland plans to distribute Starbase
products though its own channels. Starbase makes software that for
developers looking to create, manage and change their software programs.
With the deal, Borland assumes more than 4,200 Starbase customers worldwide
for end-to-end software that covers management, application software and
content development and change and configuration management.
Borland CEO Dale Fuller said it taps into a market estimated to reach $1
billion by 2004 and would speed up its plans to integrating all phases of
software development into a single service that unifies the design,
development, testing, and deployment phases of the software application
lifecycle.
The Starbase deal is the second high-profile acquisition by Borland in
recent months. The company, which styles itself as the only independent path
to Microsoft’s .NET, acquired
the assets of Sweden’s BoldSoft MDE Aktiebolag, a deal made mostly to gain
technology and personnel, which it intends to use for design-driven
development for the Microsoft .NET framework.
Back in May, Borland gobbled
up the assets of privately held Highlander Engineering, Inc., a
transaction valued at around @ million. That acquisition was aimed at
integrating Highlander’s software products and services into Borland’s
Enterprise Server to help it tackle the embedded systems market.
