Oracle To Acquire Carleton Corporation

Oracle Corporation and Carleton Corporation announced that the two companies have signed a definitive merger agreement for Oracle to acquire Carleton, producer of data quality and mainframe data extraction software for customer-focused data warehousing applications. The acquisition will be effected through a cash merger pursuant to which holders of Carleton common stock will receive approximately $2.45 per share or $8.7 million in the aggregate. The parties anticipate closing the transaction by the end of February 2000, which is subject to approval by Carleton's stockholders and certain other closing conditions.

The Carleton acquisition enhances Oracle Warehouse, a solution for data warehousing and e-business intelligence applications. Specifically, Carleton's software will become a part of Oracle Warehouse Builder, a framework for designing, generating and loading enterprise data warehouses, data marts and e-business intelligence applications. As part of Oracle Warehouse Builder, Carleton's Pure*Integrate software will create a consistent, consolidated view of customer data by using name and address data cleansing and validation capabilities to identify unique customers and households used in Customer Relationship Management e-Business applications. Carleton's Pure*Extract software will accelerate the process of preparing information for a data warehouse by integrating vast quantities of data from many different sources, including more than forty mainframe and legacy database systems such as VSAM, IMS, and DB/2.

"Carleton established itself as an early innovator in customer data quality, which is extremely complementary with Oracle's vision for data warehousing and CRM," said Michael Howard, vice president of Oracle's Data Warehouse Program Office. "This acquisition enhances our strategy and delivery of e-business solutions that yield an accurate, unified view of customers."