Analyzing Web Traffic, Firm Purchased Adobe

Adobe Systems said it would buy the Web analytics software company Omniture for about $1.8 billion, giving the maker of content-creation software a way to let marketers monitor the effectiveness of such content.

Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., will pay $21.50 a share in cash, a premium of 24 percent over Omniture’s closing stock price Tuesday. Omniture shares jumped nearly 26 percent in after-hours trading.

Adobe also said it had earned $136 million, or 26 cents a share, in the fiscal third quarter that ended in August, down 29 percent from the same time a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, Adobe earned 35 cents a share, a penny above what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting.

Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, Flash and Acrobat software, said its revenue fell 21 percent to $697.5 million.

Omniture, based in Orem, Utah, offers a variety of Web traffic analysis tools and other products for companies to improve their marketing over the Internet. The acquisition would marry Adobe’s tools for creating Web sites and ads with Omniture’s services for figuring how to best deliver messages.

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, said the planned acquisition would allow Adobe to create new streams of revenue even as its existing businesses declined.

Though he called the deal “timely,” Mr. Chowdhry said Adobe was overpaying. He said $12 to $13 a share, rather than $21.50, would have been a fair value.

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Analyzing Web Traffic, Firm Purchased Adobe was first posted on September 16, 2009 at 4:09 pm.
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