Event
Summary
"REDWOOD
SHORES, Calif., and MINNETONKA, Minn., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Oracle Corporation
(Nasdaq: ORCL) and Carleton Corporation (Nasdaq: CARL) today announced that
the two companies have signed a definitive merger agreement for Oracle to acquire
Carleton, an early innovator of data quality and mainframe data extraction software
for customer-focused data warehousing applications. The acquisition will be
effected through a cash merger pursuant to which holders of Carleton common
stock will receive approximately $2.45 per share or $8.7 million in the aggregate.
The parties anticipate closing the transaction by the end of February 2000,
which is subject to approval by Carleton's stockholders and certain other closing
conditions". The offer values Carleton shares at $2.45 a share, which is less
than the stock's closing price on Monday of $2.56.
According
to Michael Howard, vice president of Oracle's Data Warehouse Program Office,
"It increases our ability to provide better knowledge to customers; it's a big
win for Oracle. There's a lot of dirty data about customers today; it's stored
in a fragmented way. The Carleton software can clean it up. This is a top priority
for e-businesses."
Carleton
was founded in 1979 and marketed a product called Passport, which was an early
leader in extract/transform/load tools for data warehousing. It was a strong
contender with customers who had mainframe legacy data such as sequential files
and VSAM. In 1997 Apertus Corporation acquired Carlton, and the new company
became the Apertus Carlton Corporation. Apertus was a supplier of data cleansing
and integration software. The product of this merger became Carleton Pure*Extract
(data movement) and Carleton Pure*Integrate (data cleansing and validation).
In September, Carlton secured a working capital line of credit from Silicon
Valley Bank of Santa Clara, California in order to continue its growth strategy.
Carlton had problems with their market capitalization, and their 52-week low
stock price at the time of the announcement was $1.00 per share. .
Market
Impact
TEC predicted Carlton would be acquired in the news analysis "Data
Warehouse Vendors Moving Towards Application Suites", September 29, 1999.
With this acquisition, Oracle gains access to both the data extraction/transformation
and the data cleansing technologies. Oracle has traditionally had their customers
use Oracle gateways to access mainframe data, so it is very probable that the
data cleansing technology is what they were after for inclusion in Oracle Warehouse
Builder. Carleton has been an obvious takeover candidate for some time because
of their financial problems. Oracle is the second vendor to acquire data cleansing
technology recently, as Ardent Software acquired Prism and its QDB data cleansing
technology earlier in the year. More vendors will need to add this feature to
their suite, so TEC reiterates the prediction that the remaining data cleansing
vendors, such as Vality and Trillium, will be courted vigorously by the remaining
extract/transform/load vendors such as Computer Associates and Sagent.
User
Recommendations
Companies should include Oracle Warehouse Builder on any long list of vendors
for data warehousing solutions. However, they should keep in mind that the product
was already eight months late before this announcement and has been reported
to still lack "critical functionality" needed in production environments, according
to a confidential report by Honeywell, Inc. on a pre-beta version of the software
in mid-September. The fact that Oracle now intends to include the Pure*Extract
and Pure*Integrate functionality is likely to slow development even further.