{"id":576591,"date":"2010-05-24T12:50:54","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T16:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=121781"},"modified":"2010-05-24T12:50:54","modified_gmt":"2010-05-24T16:50:54","slug":"att%e2%80%99s-tarnished-1-4b-sterling-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/576591","title":{"rendered":"AT&T\u2019s Tarnished $1.4B Sterling Sale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> AT&T said today it’s agreed to sell its Sterling Commerce software division to IBM<\/a> for $1.4 billion. The deal will let AT&T offload a business unit that SBC Communications bought for $3.9 billion at the height of the dot-com boom<\/a> (SBC went on to buy AT&T in 2005<\/a> but kept the iconic telecom name). Sterling offers pricing and e-commerce software that businesses can use to manage pricing in real time or to get an entire view of their inventory, from marketing to fulfillment.<\/p>\n

However, AT&T isn’t a software company, and the original rationale behind buying Sterling — namely that the phone company could become an exchange for online pricing — never panned out. So even though the sale price is much less than what SBC paid back in 2000, the deal is a good way for AT&T (which never integrated Sterling into its business) to get rid of a non-core asset. IBM’s acquisition will pit it against similar software from HP and other large enterprise software providers, which is where Sterling belongs anyhow.<\/p>\n

Image courtesy<\/a> of Flickr user zzzack<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

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AT&T said today it’s agreed to sell its Sterling Commerce software division to IBM for $1.4 billion. The deal will let AT&T offload a business unit that SBC Communications bought for $3.9 billion at the height of the dot-com boom (SBC went on to buy AT&T in 2005 but kept the iconic telecom name). Sterling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-telecom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}