Yatra acquires Air Travel Bureau

Yatra, the NASDAQ listed online travel Company, has entered into an agreement to acquire Air Travel Bureau Ltd, which it says is India’s largest independent corporate travel services provider, with gross bookings of Rs 1500 crores, and a client base of over 400 large and medium businesses across India.

ATB is a 30 year old company and claims that it can help companies save up to 20% of their corporate travel costs. For ATB, they’ll also get access to Yatra’s aggregation of hotels, which they can offer to their clients. According to ATB’s website, they have their own online booking tool with web-fares; travel policy compliance tools, built-in trip authorization and travel notifications, and a real-time view of travel spend for travel managers, apart from integration with ERP solutions like SAP and Oracle.

The acquisition of ATB essentially helps Yatra strengthen its position in the more reliable corporate travel business vertical, even as it tries to find its own space in a market that the MakeMyTrip - Goibibo combine dominate. In July 2016, Yatra had signed a reverse-merger agreement with US-based special purpose acquisition company Terrapin 3 Acquisition Corp, which was listed on the NASDAQ, paving the way for a back-door listing of the second Indian online travel services provider in the US.

Yatra was founded in 2006 by former Ebookers Group (UK) executives Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra. Amin is now chief information officer and Chopra is executive vice president of operations. The company is backed by a string of venture capital, private equity and strategic investors. In October last year, it sold a small stake to Reliance Industries Ltd as part of a deal linked to an existing partnership where Reliance pre-installed the Yatra mobile app in its Lyf-branded 4G handsets.

Oracle buys NetSuite

Oracle will acquire NetSuite for about $9.3 Billion, or $109 per share in all cash deal. Both Oracle and NetSuite’s cloud service offerings aimed at enterprise customers will continue to operate and coexist in the marketplace forever.

Eighteen year old NetSuite claims a dominant position in the cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) space, which includes offerings to help businesses track supply and demand, inventory, accounting, customer relationships (CRM) and HR. The ERP industry has been an active space for M&A and general consolidation over the past few years, and Oracle in general has been an aggressive acquirer of smaller companies throughout 2016, with recent pick-ups including Opower and Textura.

Oracle acquisition of NetSuite dwarfs its previous 2016 acquisitions in total deal value, though it still ranks below the all-time leader, PeopleSoft, which Oracle acquired for a heady $10.3 Billion way back in 2004, when such stratospheric values were even more uncommon. While their service offerings are similar, NetSuite offers Oracle access to companies sized smaller than its traditional clientele, and could also give it some additional competitive edge in taking on primary rival Salesforce.

Infosys Buys Panaya

Infosys is an Indian Multinational corporation that provides business consulting, information technology, software engineering, and outsourcing services. It is headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka. Panaya is American software as a Service (SaaS) company that provides cloud based quality management services for enterprise applications worldwide. Its services run on the Amazon Product Advertising API.

Infosys announced that it would buy automation technology company Panaya Inc, at an enterprise value of about $200 Million, as the third largest IT Company in the world looks to boost competitiveness and margins. Panaya Technology would help it to bring automation to several service lines through software as a service model, reducing risks, costs, and the time taken to bring services in the market.

For $8.25 Billion turnover Infosys, which has a cash reserve of $5.4 Billion, this is the second largest acquisition after the September 2012 buyout of Switzerland based SAP services company Loadstone Management Consultancy for $345 Million. Infosys is acquiring Panaya at a time when IT services companies are laying greater emphasis on automation as workforce optimization holds key to profitability for the industry which is primarily driven by human resource.

Infosys and its peers TCS, Wipro, and HCL have been deploying automation to enhance delivery to their clients. Infosys has been traditionally shy of acquisition making less than half a dozen buyouts in its existence of over 33 years most of which were small with deal size below $50 Million. Infosys has been making big bets on automation and other new technology like artificial intelligence and cloud based services as the company tries to regain some lost ground from rivals like Tata Consultancy Services.