TSI Acquires Novera

TSI Software, an enterprise application integration software maker, not only bought Novera Software's message that Novera's application server is a specialized vehicle for integrating legacy applications, it also bought Novera.

TSI said yesterday it was purchasing Novera for 1.8 million shares of TSI common stock. The stock dropped 0.875 at the opening of trading this morning and was selling at $26.25 per share at midmorning. At that price, the deal is valued at $47.3 million.

Novera positioned itself earlier this year as an application server that fed legacy data to another application server closer to the Web server. In doing so, it was addressing an emerging bottleneck in large Web sites - the need to call up data out of multiple mainframe file systems, applications and legacy databases.

TSI produces the Mercator package of application integration software, including Mercator for R/3 for the integration of SAP AG enterprise resource planning packages.

Novera is the latest of a long string of application server vendors to be acquired or go public. Apptivity was acquired by Progress Software, NetDynamics was acquired by Sun Microsystems, Kiva Software was acquired by the former Netscape Communications, and WebLogic was acquired by BEA Systems. Bluestone Software and SilverStream Software launched initial public offerings over the last two months.