28 June 2005 Sun Microsystems has agreed to buy enterprise integrator SeeBeyond for $387 million in cash. Under the agreement, Sun said it will pay $4.25 for each SeeBeyond share – a premium of nearly 30% above its Nasdaq closing price of $3.28 on Monday.

Following quickly on the heels of Sun’s acquisition of StorageTek, Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy heralded the deal as a “little smaller but very strategic”.

“We will be able to deliver what other vendors only have in their vision papers – an ideal platform for business and systems integrators to build the next generation applications for the future,” said McNealy.

SeeBeyond has some 2,000 customers worldwide, but its most recent full-year revenues were a modest $167 million. Sun believes the acquisition will allow it to provide the industry’s best offering for the development, deployment and management of enterprise applications and service orientated architectures, filling a gap in its Java Enterprise System.

But analysts were cool on the deal. Neal Ward-Dutton of analyst company Macehiter Ward-Dutton said: “Sun is not known for the success of its software acquisitions. Many other key software acquisitions have fizzled out – leaving both customers and investors short on value.”

Jim Demetriades, the founder and CEO of SeeBeyond, said: “This transaction will combine the leader in Java and web services with a leader in integration, bringing to market what we believe to be the most comprehensive and productive application development suite available today.”