IBM Corp. announced Tuesday that it will bolster its e-business infrastructure offerings by purchasing customer relationship and supply chain management software company CrossWorlds Software Inc. for US$129 million in cash.
IBM and CrossWorlds have been integration partners for four years, which has permitted IBM’s WebSphere e-business infrastructure products to work closely with CrossWorlds’ software. IBM intends to absorb CrossWorld into its software group, then market and sell CrossWorld products with a joint sales force under the WebSphere brand, said Tim Breuer, an IBM spokesman.
The deal could be seen as a rescue operation for an IBM partner. Since its founding in 1996, CrossWorlds has yet to turn a profit, and needed financing within the next year in order to stay afloat, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If the company went under, CrossWorlds’ customers would have to seek another vendor, potentially leaving IBM as well.
Burlingame, Calif.-based CrossWorlds makes integration software that is very specific to certain industries, Breuer said. The majority of its revenue comes from software sales and services in four industries – complex industrial manufacturing, process manufacturing, financial services, and telecommunication.
“WebSphere is really handling transactions and integration at a horizontal level,” he said. “You can use the CrossWorlds software to integrate in very specific industries.”
IBM announced in April that WebSphere would form the base for its Web services offerings. WebSphere is application server software, pushing the functions of other software out to network-connected users. Because it works on top of a server’s operating system, but also functions as a layer of software underneath application programs, it’s called middleware. IBM has been pushing WebSphere hard, with good results – WebSphere revenue grew 75 per cent in the third quarter of 2001, as compared to the same quarter of 2000.
CrossWorlds (CWLD) went public on the Nasdaq exchange in June 2000 at US$10 a share, peaked three months later at about US$25, then slid with the rest of the market to Monday’s closing price of US$3.54. It employs about 328 people.
IBM’s offer values the company at about a 30 per cent premium over its current market value. The deal is subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, and should be complete by the first quarter of 2002, IBM said.
CrossWorlds, in Burlingame, Calif., is at http://www.crossworlds.com/.
