Application development software specialist Centura Software Corp’s planned acquisition of privately-held InfoSpinner has been unexpectedly derailed at the last moment, with the news that it had failed to win a majority vote of shareholders to approve the merger. The deal, announced in January (CI 3,076), was to have put the former Gupta Corp in the position of paying 4.5 million of its shares for the much smaller outfit in a transaction then valued at $16.3m. Centura, based in Menlo Park, California, wanted to use the Richardson, Texas based company’s software to underpin its recently announced ForeSite 2.0 Web development tool. ForeSite is claimed to allow applications written in Cobol, Powerbuilder, Microsoft Visual Basic and CICS-based mainframe applications to be fully integrated into the Web, and to offer them an ActiveX and Corba compliant face in addition. A factor behind the reluctance of Centura shareholders to approve the deal may well be the slump in the Centura share price, which stood at just under $3 around the time of the announcement but which is now about half of that. This is speculative, since Centura representatives failed to return calls before our press deadline. The news is disappointing for doughty Centura, which has somehow struggled on despite having its founder being forced out, and it having to restate all its financial results for its 1993, 1994 and 1995 fiscals. Both companies expressed their disappointment in a prepared statement, but stressed that the worldwide distribution arrangement separately agreed whereby Centura has a right to distribute ForeSite Web Integration Server is unaffected by the termination of the merger process. But how well the companies can continue to make real their commitments to ForeSite 2.0 remains very much to be seen.
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