Ebay Cashes in Now on Bill Me Later
eBay, conceding its struggle to build out the Pay Later online credit service, forked over $945 million in cash and options to buy Bill Me Later and incorporate the service into its PayPal unit. Bill Me Later brings along a host of mega e-tailer clients who hosted the service on their checkout pages. It also makes for strange bedfellows: Amazon was an equity investor in Bill Me Later (no board seat, though), and was its top client. Amazon previously ditched PayPal after its eBay takeover.
Outsource Overture Tata Buys Citi Unit
As rumored this summer, India's Tata Consultancy Services took over Citi's overseas Global Services outsourced processing business, in a deal worth $505 million-plus a nine-year contract worth $2.5 million a year for Tata to retain the process outsourcing business of Citi units worldwide, most importantly in the U.S. The Citi unit brought in $278 million in revenue last year, a little more than half the price paid by Tata.
Symantec's SAAS Play in Messagelabs Deal
Symantec bulked up its SAAS market position in a $695 million acquisition of managed security services firm MessageLabs, which specializes in online messaging and e-mail security solutions for 19,000 corporate end-users-including financial services - with support from 14 global data centers. Cupertino, CA-based Symantec will pitch its on-demand security, storage and remote access to the MessageLabs client base, plus tap MessageLabs's brainpower to develop future SAAS offerings in data loss prevention, compliance, endpoint security and archiving.
