GSI Commerce to Acquire E-Dialog
GSI Commerce, an e-commerce platform company, will acquire e-mail service provider E-Dialog for $147.8 million in cash and $9.2 million in stock, making the deal worth $157 million.
Under the deal, GSI will pay another $750,000 if certain unspecified goals are met.
The acquisition is expected to close in the next 30 days. After that, E-Dialog will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of King of Prussia PA-based GSI. E-Dialog’s offices will remain in Lexington, MA, John Rizzi will remain CEO and there will be no resulting layoffs, Rizzi said.
Whereas some well-known acquisitions in the e-mail service provider arena have been difficult from a cultural and technological standpoint — such as Epsilon and its well-known difficulties meshing DoubleClick and Bigfoot Interactive’s platforms and workers — Rizzi said he doesn’t expect those problems with this deal.
“Certainly we’ve seen and largely benefited from some of the challenges that our competitors have had when they’ve combined with other e-mail companies and have had to answer the question like: ‘Which platform survives?’ and ‘Which engineering team keeps building?’ and ‘Which professional services team survives?'” he said. “Truly the beauty of this situation is there are no such questions. GSI has no e-mail platform.”
The move also means E-Dialog is joining the ranks of e-mail service providers becoming public companies. GSI trades under the symbol GSIC on Nasdaq.
Constant Contact went public in October. ExactTarget has filed the paperwork to go public early this year.
E-Dialog has increasingly been considered a top-tier e-mail service provider over the last several years.
The company’s clients include American Eagle Outfitters, Avis, Boots, BMG Music Service, British Airways, CBS, Dell, FT.com, Hewlett Packard EMEA, Nintendo, the National Football League, Reuters, the Royal Bank of Scotland group of companies, and The TJX Cos.
GSI also has dozens of household-name-name clients including Ace Hardware, Adidas, American Eagle Outfitters, HBO, Hershey, the Houston Texans football team, Iomega, Palm, Major League Baseball, the NFL, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, QVC, Babies ‘R’ Us and Ralph Lauren.
One e-mail industry expert who asked not to be named said GSI’s acquisition of E-Dialog could be seen as a move to more closely match the offerings of competitor Digital River, which acquired e-mail service provider Blue Hornet in 2004.
