ORCL: Oracle Buys Stellent (STEL)

Oracle announced that it has agreed to acquire Stellent, Inc. (NASDAQ: STEL), a global provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software solutions, through a cash tender offer for $13.50 per share, or approximately $440 million.
With Stellent Universal Content Management, customers can easily deploy multiple line-of- business applications -- such as public Web sites, secure intranets and extranets, compliance processes, and marketing brand management -- and also scale the technology to support multi-site management and enterprise-wide content management needs. The acquisition of Stellent will complement and extend Oracle's existing content management solution portfolio. Oracle Content Database enables enterprises to store and centrally manage unstructured content in Oracle Databases. Stellent's Universal Content Management solution works with Oracle Content Database and offers a variety of best-of-breed solutions for Document Management, Web Content Management, Information Rights Management, Digital Asset Management, Records and Retention Management, Imaging, and Governance, Risk, and Compliance.

More than 4,700 customers worldwide -- including Procter & Gamble, Merrill Lynch, Los Angeles County, The Home Depot, British Red Cross, ING, Vodafone, Georgia Pacific, Bayer Corp., and Genzyme Corp. -- have selected Stellent solutions to power their content-centric business applications. Stellent has broad partnerships and is widely adopted by a number of leading system integrators and resellers. Stellent is also seen as an industry leader by a variety of industry analysts and won a number of awards from independent technology publications.

"The amount of electronic content, unstructured data, and documents is growing very rapidly and organizations are seeking advanced and automated content and process management solutions to manage this information to meet regulatory requirements," said Oracle Senior Vice President, Thomas Kurian. "Stellent's enterprise content management solutions enable a variety of people within an organization to create, capture, store, manage, publish, view, search, and archive all types of documents across their entire lifecycle."

"Oracle's acquisition of Stellent will be a positive milestone for all of our stakeholders -- shareholders, employees, customers and partners," said Stellent President and Chief Executive Officer, Robert Olson. "Our leading product suite will have the dedicated resources and broad distribution networks of the largest enterprise software company in the world, which will elevate our award-winning solutions to new levels within the enterprise content management industry."

The transaction is subject to customary conditions and is expected to close by the end of the year or early 2007. More information is available at http://www.oracle.com/stellent