Business-to-business messaging service company Critical Path Inc. late Tuesday cemented a deal to acquire eBusiness infrastructure software provider PeerLogic Inc. for about $416 million in stock.
Critical Path will issue 6.4 million shares of its common stock and assume all outstanding PeerLogic options. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter. Critical Path said it expects the transaction to be accretive to 2001 consensus estimates for revenue and earnings per share and it does not anticipate the acquisition to affect its commitment to fourth-quarter profitability.
Both companies have a large presence in the global distributed directory marketplace, and Critical Path is banking that the acquisition will allow it to become the dominant player in the sector. The company said the acquisition of PeerLogic adds scale and market presence in secure end-to-end messaging. PeerLogic also brings a number of distributors and customers to the table, including EDS, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Britain’s Royal Mail. Critical Path already has relationships with the national postal services in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, and Sweden. Its meta-directory customers include Procter & Gamble, State Farm Insurance, The Associates and BNP Paribas.
PeerLogic also brings its LiveContent DIRECTORY, a scaleable, high-performance, high-capacity, comprehensive LDAP directory system which handles messaging, security, public key infrastructure and corporate information requirements in stand alone and distributed directory environments. Critical Path said that LiveContent DIRECTORY, combined with its InJoin Directory Server and InJoin Meta-Directory engine creates the most comprehensive, scaleable directory services solution available.
Doug Hickey, Critical Path’s chief executive officer, said the acquisition would allow Critical Path to offer mission-critical directory and integration solutions that enable business information to flow between any two points in the electronic economy.
