SBI Moves To Acquire Lante Following Acquisition Of Scient

SBI Lante

Salt Lake City-based SBI said it plans to complete a cash purchase of all Lante's publicly held outstanding stock shares for $1.10 per share, or about $42 million, a 100 percent premium over Lante's closing price of 55 cents per share on Thursday.

Shares of Lante were trading at $1.06 Friday morning following the announcement. The deal is scheduled to begin within 10 business days and is expected to close during the third quarter.

SBI has been hot on the acquisition trail since the beginning of 2001. On Wednesday, the company struck a deal to acquire another former high-flying Web integrator, New York-based Scient. Scient had previously acquired another struggling Web integrator, Atlanta-based iXL, in an attempt to weather dwindling revenue amid the dot-com bust, down market and uncertain economy.

Those efforts came to a crashing halt this week, however, when Scient announced it filed for bankruptcy and worked out a deal under which SBI will purchase certain Scient assets, including staff in the United Kingdom and the United States; offices in Dallas, New York and Chicago; and seven clients, whose identities SBI executives would not disclose.

The acquisition of Lante makes five acquisitions for SBI over the past 18 months. In addition to its acquisition of MarchFirst assets in June 2001, SBI has followed with acquisitions of Emerald Solutions in December 2001, WebFlow in May 2002 and this week Scient and Lante.

The Lante acquisition will add about 160 employees to SBI's roster as well as offices in Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle and New York. That will bring the total number of SBI employees close to the 800 mark.

The acquisition of Lante, according to SBI, adds skills in extended enterprise, framework development, B2B integration solutions, enterprise application development, portal work and technology foundation development and deployment.

Upon the completion of the Scient acquisition, Coleman Barney, SBI's co-founder and senior vice president, said the three acquisition deals during the past year represent just a fraction of the deals the company has been presented.

Barney said SBI hasn't lost any money since completing its acquisition of MarchFirst, and following the acquisition of Emerald Solutions the company continues to be profitable.

AMY ROGERS contrbuted to this story.