Tacitly acknowledging that its efforts to build up a comprehensive tools portfolio by a string of small acquisitions tacked on to big in-house development efforts have not got the company where it wanted to be today, Emeryville, California relational database developer Sybase Inc yesterday announced that it was going for the big one and eating Powersoft Corp in a share exchange valuing the Concord, Massachusetts tools developer at an indicated $915m after the shares slipped to $47 even on the news. The paper valuation of Sybase’s shares at $47 is $75.20 apiece, and the shares jumped $11.625 to $73 on the news. The valuations are all astronomical – Sybase was valued by the market at $2,657m before the deal was announced, and Powersoft holders will end up with about 26.3% of the enlarged company, which Sybase reckons will be the seventh largest software company, with annualised sales currently running at $730m. Powersoft’s PowerBuilder competes directly with Build Momentum, Sybase’s mid-range product due out next month, which is derived from technology developed by its Wyvern Technology Inc acquisition: Sybase says the Windows application development tool will now be held in controlled release, pending exploration of product synergies. The Powersoft acquisition does not seem to help Sybase with the top-end Enterprise Momemntum repository-based top-down development environment, which the company has just announced will not now appear in the form originally envisaged, and is seen in part as a pre-emptive move against Oracle Corp’s Project X. The acquisition also brings Sybase Powersoft’s own Canadian acquisition, Watcom International Inc, which brought Powersoft its entree for the low-end desktop market but seems to conflict with Sybase’s recently announced alliance with Borland International Inc. The combined company will have some $236m cash and Powersoft will be run as an independent subsidiary of Sybase.
