Merger Mania At Its Extremes
P.J. Jakovljevic - October 9, 2002

Event Summary

The long ongoing consolidation in the ERP market seems to have begun to spill into adjacent enterprise applications markets, possibly with some additional twists like involving more than two parties in the marriage. At the beginning of September, to address the market demand for solutions that enable greater supply chain agility (in terms of visibility and event management) and bottom line impact, SynQuest, Inc. (NASDAQ/SC: SYNQ), a provider of supply chain planning (SCP) solutions, and two privately held supply chain event management (SCEM) providers, Viewlocity, Inc. and Tilion, Inc., announced that they had entered into definitive agreements to merge the companies. SynQuest and Viewlocity, both based in Atlanta, GA will merge operations, and Boston, MA-based Tilion will merge into the combined company to provide approximately $13 million in cash. The companies claim the transactions extend the existing partnership between SynQuest and Viewlocity, and will strengthen the financial resources available to the post-transaction company...