Compaq bought Shopping.Com for $19 per share cash, a 44% premium on Shopping.Com’s closing price of $13.1875 on Friday 9th January’s, in a deal worth $220 million. Compaq plans to link Shopping.com to its AltaVista web site to make it a more commerce-driven portal. In a busy week for Lucent and Ascend Communications, Lucent acquired Ascend for $20 billion in stock laying rest to rumors that had been circulating every since Lucent spun itself out of A&T back in 1996. Lucent is buying Ascend for its wide area data networking equipment, in particular its ATM switching products and its portfolio of service provider customers. Lucent also announced plans to buy privately-held billing and customer care provider Kenan Systems for $1.48 billion in stock. The deal, it says, should provide it with an immediate fillip in the customer care market, promote growth beyond the US and provide a global sales channel. Ascend announced it would sell the computer division of Stratus Computer to the unit’s management team in a deal worth between $100 million and $150 million. Stratus specializes in Signalling System 7 (SS7) software and technology as well as high-end fault- tolerant server system, designed to enable the integration of voice on data networks. Cognos announced plans to move into data marts with the $10 million acquisition of Relational Matters in a mixture of cash and stock. Cognos says the technology will extend the OLAP capabilities of its PowerPlay, PowerCubes and Impromptu Catalogs products, simplifying the loading of data marts, merging operational and flat file data sources, and coordinating views of data marts throughout a company. E-payments companies, NYCE and Magic Line, decided to merge to form one the biggest US electronic payments companies with combined annual revenues of $100 million in the first year. The privately-held companies did not reveal the terms of the merger but said the combined company would continue to offer various electronic payment services – such as telephone-based and browser-based banking and bill payment services – and would together be supporting one-third of the bank-affiliated households in the US. SPSS bought the UK’s Integral Solutions and its highly regarded Clementine data modeling engine for $7.1 million in cash, continuing its transition to selling high-tag data mining solutions. SAP bought one of Digital Equipment’s research centers in Germany for an undisclosed sum. The center, Campus Engineering Center (CEC), based in Karlsruhe, researches and develops software for use in distributed computer systems and has 20 employees. Computer Associates acquired Cybec Pty Ltd, a privately-held Australian developer of anti-virus software for an undisclosed figure. CA says the buy will strengthen its own anti-virus resources and boost its position in the Australian and Asian markets.
