Yesterday Adobe has published that they entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire Omniture in a transaction valued at something like 1.8 billon dollars (fully diluted equity-value basis), with a valuation of 21.5 dollars per share in cash.
After reading this announcement lot of things came into my mind and after analyzing for a while I think that things are getting clear to me.
Remember the following graph from this post?
Well apparently I was right, free tools are getting smarter, no doubt about that and paid tools are working harder to add enough value for making their prices look fair.
So, why is Omniture selling their business? Well two things come into my mind. First is that they were investing a lot of money last years in their platform and in my opinion (and apparently in lot of people opinion) they never demonstrated that their solution worth the asked price and their resulting in a market share contraction.
On the other hand, why is Adobe to acquire this company from that particular business? Well, I have no doubt about they will announce something like “the solution to the headaches of the Flash sites developers” or “measure your Flash websites is easier than never before” but my perception the acquisition is not really related to a Flash Site measurement improvement. In my opinion you can find the answer of this “move” into two keywords [finance] and [stock market].
Come on boys…what’s behind this acquisition?