Acquisition news

With its acquisition last month of a Gaithersburg, Md.-based consultancy, Calibre Inc. strengthens its strategic management and engineering analysis capabilities and adds a customer list that includes the Army, Navy and Energy Department.SMI, which provides services to the government in areas such as environmental services and nuclear engineering and licensing, had about $5.1 million in revenue in 2003. The employee-owned Calibre's revenue was $51 million last year.Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In one of the sharpest blows yet to Oracle Corp.'s hostile attempt to takeover software rival PeopleSoft, the federal government sued at the end of last month to block the $9.4 billion deal."This transaction is anti-competitive, pure and simple," R. Hewitt Pate, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, said in a statement. "Under any traditional merger analysis, this deal substantially lessens competition in an important market."Earlier in February, Justice Department lawyers recommended that the government oppose the merger. Attorneys general from seven states joined the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco.Seattle-based supercomputer maker Cray Inc. said it will acquire privately held OctigaBay Systems Corp. of Vancouver, British Columbia, for approximately $115 million.OctigaBay has been developing a high-performance computing system for scientific and technical computing users. Previewed in November 2003, the OctigaBay 12K has an architecture that embeds a high-speed interconnect and application accelerators to remove bottlenecks. The result, according to OctigaBay, is improved performance on real-world applications.Early shipments of the OctigaBay product are expected in the second half of 2004. Pricing is expected to range from under $100,000 to about $2 million.Advanced Technology Systems Inc. has acquired Voyager Systems Inc., a provider of secure wireless solutions and services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.The acquisition will enhance McLean-Va.-based ATS' offerings in information sharing, interoperability, communications and public safety for the law enforcement and homeland security markets.Voyager of San Diego will operate as a division of ATS. The company's flagship product, Voyager Query, offers secure wireless access to standard queries on federal, state and local agency databases, such as the FBI's National Crime Information Center.