SAP To Acquire Ariba Fo...

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report  citing FactSet data. The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP. The deal will be  funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions  in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud. Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce. The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle. “The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement . “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

Still Smiling, Eduardo?...

Another development in the ongoing story of how Eduardo Saverin has given up his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying $67 million in taxes related to Facebook’s IPO: the U.S. government doesn’t want him get away with it quite so fast. Today, Senators Charles Schumer and Bob Casey are expected to announce a plan they have to re-impose the taxes on Saverin, part of a bigger scheme to go after expatriates who give up citizenship in order to avoid taxes. On top of that, they want to make it official that people who do avoid paying their taxes by renouncing citizenship are unable from ever re-entering the country again. The plan, the offices of the two Senators said, will be announced today at 11am Eastern in a press conference at the Senate Radio-TV Gallery in the U.S. Capitol building. Called the “Ex-Patriot” act (short for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy”, according to ABC News ), the act proposes to re-impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anyone who renounces citizenship — even if they are no longer resident in the U.S. In Singapore, where Saverin currently resides, individuals do not need to pay capital gains taxes, so it’s thought that Saverin is using his residency there to avoid paying a minimum $67 million tax bill — more if the share price rises — on shares that he sells in Facebook after the company is expected to IPO tomorrow. He is expected to make $3.84 billion once Facebook goes public. Saverin has lived in Singapore since 2009 and renounced his citizenship in September 2011. It’s not clear how many other ex-pats might be liable for such hefty bills if the act gets passed. Facebook, which is expected to raise at least $16 billion in the IPO, is one of the biggest IPOs of all time and is getting an extra level of scrutiny as a result, with the debate ranging from accusations of being plain wrong in his approach and others, if not exactly supporting him, pointing out the other side of the debate and how he’s just being a good old, gambling capitalist . Well, Schumer (D-NY) and Casey (D-PA) are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. They will call Saverin’s $67 million tax “duck” an “outrage” today in their press conference, and detail the rest of the Ex-Patriot act.

“Published” Tumblr Post...

When you publish on Tumblr, you can now auto-share your post to the Facebook News Feed and feature it prominently on your Timeline. More Facebook referral traffic will be the result of these improvements as well as Ticker and Timeline sharing of your Likes and replies that were announced today . Importantly, though, the posts you read won’t be auto-shared. By giving Tumblr posts their own structured, Open Graph data type rather than classifying them as standard links, your Tumbl’d cat memes, hipster photos, and random thoughts will stay visible even after you post Facebook status updates and other content. Tumblr writers can enable the new features in their Tumblr settings . If you turn all the features on, your Tumblr replies will get pushed to Facebook. All your Likes of other posts will too, but Tumblr notes “They even get lumped together so they’re not overwhelming!” One thing that won’t be auto-shared is what posts you read. That type of Open Graph integration has boosted virality for news sites like The Guardian, Washington Post and Facebook’s new enemy Yahoo . But unlike mainstream news sites, Tumblrs run the gamut from family-friendly to very NSFW. Auto-sharing of what blog posts you read could therefore offend and embarrass, so its smart that Tumblr is keeping that stuff private.

HP Combines Printers An...

HP announced today that the two of the company’s largest divisions will be combined into one, if you will, super division. The Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) and Personal Systems Group (PSG) are joining together to be called The Printing and Personal Systems Group. This is a long time coming. As the press release mentions, the driving force behind the change is to improve performance and increase profits. Both groups are suffering from the move to the post-PC era. HP almost spun off the PSG in the middle of 2011 and printer and ink sales are dipping down. The two groups are vulnerable separate. But together, they can pool resources and hopefully survive in this brave new world. The new group will be lead by Todd Bradley, the former executive vice president of PSG. Vyomesh Joshi, the executive vice president of IPG, is retiring from a 31-year stay at HP. “This combination will bring together two businesses where HP has established global leadership,” said Meg Whitman, CEO of HP in a released statement today. “By providing the best in customer-focused innovation and operational efficiency, we believe we will create a winning scenario for customers, partners and shareholders.” The streamlining strategy will no doubt cost some people their jobs. Both former groups within HP were massive entities, each employing engineers to support staff. There is likely a good amount redundant positions in the new group. The two teams will likely employ the each other’s best practices and designs. Hopefully that doesn’t mean selling massively-overprice proprietary PC parts in the same fashion as printer ink — because, you know, printer ink is big business.

No Card Needed: PayPal ...

PayPal today unveiled its new global payment platform for small and medium-sized businesses, PayPal Here . It brings the veteran payments solution into local stores with a new mobile app-card reader solution to rival Square. Rolling out to merchants today, it features a triangular card-reader, or dongle, that merchants can use to swipe cards of all varieties to start accepting mobile payments on-the-go — but all users need is their phones, via a startup named  Card.io . The startup, which unveiled its own consumer-facing app back in January , allows merchants to make the payment process as frictionless as possible. Available for both iPhone and Android, it provides mobile app developers a way to let consumers make purchases simply by holding the credit card up to the phone’s camera. As the company announced today on its blog , its new partnership with PayPal allows merchants to accept credit cards without readers or extra hardware: “Merchants can immediately begin accepting credit cards with nothing but a phone … We’re excited to be working with PayPal and we hope that this partnership will improve mobile commerce for both consumers and merchants.” Check out Card.io’s blog post here .