UK Office of Fair Trading and US Department of Justice have cleared SAP’s acquisition of Ariba for $4.3bn, a cloud-based collaborative commerce application provider.
UK Office of Fair Trading will not refer the acquisition to the UK Competition Commission which is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2012.
Ariba also said that US Department of Justice has terminated the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act relating to the acquisition, saying all regulatory approvals for the transaction have been received.
In May 2012, Germany based business software maker, SAP had entered into an agreement to acquire Ariba, a cloud-based business commerce network in a bid to expands its cloud based applications.
The acquisition is said to be the latest move by SAP, as it ups its ante against its rival company Oracle, as the duo compete with Salesforce.com in fast growing cloud-computing services to grow its revenue.
In recent years, SAP and Oracle are in acquisition spree, SAP acquired SuccessFactors in December 2011 for $3.4bn which provides online personnel-management applications.
SAP is planning to generate revenue of $2.5bn from such systems to help the company reach a sales target of more than €20bn by 2015.
In 2010, SAP acquired Sybase for $5.8bn to strengthen its database and mobile-computing applications.
Oracle too is trying to strengthen its cloud computing offering and purchased Taleo for $1.9bn, which a makes Web-based software for recruiting employees.
