While Yantra is an applications company, Sterling Commerce has been an Infrastructure supplier offering integration, EDI, and Data Synchronization solutions. One risk to Sterling is that if traditional supply chain application suppliers see them as a competitor in the Supply Chain Application space, then the partnerships with existing Supply Chain application partners could wither. That is a risk worth taking. The larger infrastructure suppliers have built out their offerings into complete technology platforms with EAI, B2B, Portals, Data management, etc. capabilities over the last few years leaving little room for the specialists in those areas. This has forced companies like Sterling Commerce, SeeBeyond and Vitria to either expand their technology footprint (a risky strategy), or move into some form of applications area. One of the difficulties of the application strategy is in acquiring enough domain specific knowledge to compete (create product, market, sell, and support) with the application suppliers who have supply chain processes embedded within their products. Sterling Commerce has taken a wiser approach and moved strongly into the application space.

"Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of SBC Communications Inc., agreed to purchase Yantra Corporation (order management and supply chain fulfillment) for approximately $170 million in cash. Though privately held, Yantra's revenue in 2003 was reported to be $26.4 million in the 2004 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list. The transaction, expected to be complete by early first quarter 2005, is subject to regulatory review. According to the company, Yantra's application suite will be incorporated into Sterling Commerce's recently announced Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture (MESA). Both MESA and Yantra are built on standards-based technology platforms that extend the value of service-oriented architectures outside the enterprise. Sterling Commerce plans to offer the integrated set of composite applications both as a software solution and as a hosted service.

Steve Banker, ARC Advisory Group, stated, "Based on our estimates of Yantra's current revenues, this deal went for over 4 times revenues - in cash! This occurs at a time when most enterprise software companies are selling for less than 1 times revenue and often in stock. Clearly, Sterling understands the differentiation the Yantra technology platform offers. This makes Sterling a player in the Supply Chain Execution market.