LEX Beware Silicon Valley executives boasting of game-changing deals. Adobe Systems’ $1.8bn all-cash offer for Omniture, a Utah-based web group that helps companies track user behaviour across internet sites, is the latest puzzler to emerge. Adobe wants to add Omniture’s number-crunching products to its array of popular creative software, such as Photoshop and Flash.
The idea is not as quixotic as Ebay’s attempt to marry online auctions with Skype’s voice-over-internet telephony. Advertising agencies may well be interested in software that combines creative production with analysis. But the deal still looks pretty wacky, especially the price. Adobe is paying a 24 per cent premium – or 29 times last year’s earnings before interest, tax depreciation and amortisation – for loss-making Omniture. It paid a 25 per cent premium when it bought Macromedia for $3.5bn in 2005 in an all-share deal, its biggest acquisition to date. But Macromedia’s web design software was a natural fit with Adobe; Omniture may prove more awkward.
