They had shown clear signs, in buying the same, but it kept mum on the price. The reason might be that there were still in talks with the other team over the pricey matters. But no more. Adobe revealed the price to be around $400 million, when it released its Q4 earnings yesterday. CFO Mark Garrett said, “Assuming we close the transaction as planned later this quarter, we would expect the acquisition to add between $60 million and $80 million to our annual revenue in fiscal 2012. It would also result in the use of approximately $400 million of our domestic cash and add approximately 350 employees to our headcount. We expect the acquisition to be slightly accretive to non-GAAP earnings for the year.”
The company’s CEO, Shantanu Narayan even had to notify the moment in his words. Talking about the acquisition, Narayan said:
Late in Q4, we announced our intent to acquire Efficient Frontier, a leader in digital ad buying and optimization. In the acquisition, which we expect will close later this quarter, we’ll add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to our existing Digital Marketing Suite. More specifically, Efficient Frontier strengthens our digital market offering in several key areas.
In social marketing, Efficient Frontier brings a social ad buying capability for Facebook, and we expect synergy with our existing Facebook ad buying functionality in our SearchCenter product. They also bring a social marketing engagement platform to help customers build, manage, monitor and measure their brand presence across the social Web. We will augment the social engagement capability with our social analytics product to provide an analytics solution that moves beyond social monitoring to tie social media to business results.
In search marketing, Efficient Frontier extends our SearchCenter solution with a complementary search portfolio optimization system.
In display marketing, Efficient Frontier has a real-time bidding system to enable our digital marketing customers to increase ad performance on major display inventory sources.
Briefing about multi-channel optimization, Efficient Frontier enables marketeers to take the guesswork out of how to spend marketing dollars across search, display and social media platforms by optimizing bids and allocating budget across all these digital channels for maximum ROI.
Adobe, on its part, has been linked with a number of start ups, to enrich its enterprise. Apart from Efficient Frontier, the pending acquisition even includes Context Optional, a subsidiary of Efficient Frontier. On the acquisition talks, earlier Adobe acquired Auditude and was even in partnership with OptiMine.