Adobe aims for a bigger piece of e-commerce pie with $1.68B purchase of Magento

Adobe Systems is looking to step up its e-commerce game by agreeing to buy Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion.

By combining the Magento Commerce Cloud with its Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe is positioning itself to be a bigger player in the e-commerce industry in order to compete against market leaders such as Oracle, SAP SE and Salesforce.

With Magento, Photoshop software provider Adobe said it would create a single platform to serve both business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers globally. Magento brings together digital commerce, order management and predictive intelligence onto a unified commerce platform to enable shopping across an array of industries including consumer-packaged goods, retail, wholesale, manufacturing and the public sector.

Through a community of more than 300,000 developers, Magento's software helps customers build and run web stores as well as handle online purchases, shipping and returns, and social media marketing.

Magento's customers include Canon, Helly Hansen, Paul Smith and Rosetta Stone. Adobe and Magento also share joint customers including Coca-Cola, Warner Music Group, Nestlé, and Cathay Pacific.

Adobe said the deal was expected to close in the third quarter of its fiscal year once it garners regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.

Once the deal closes, Magento CEO Mark Lavelle will continue to lead the Magento team as part of Adobe’s Digital Experience business, reporting to executive vice president and general manager Brad Rencher.

Campbell, California-based Magento was founded in 2008 and was bought by eBay in 2011. Magento went private in 2015 with backing from Permira Funds.

Cloud-related deals have been fast and furious over the past few weeks. HPE announced it was buying Plexxi to beef up its hybrid cloud infrastructure while Oracle announced a deal to buy machine-learning platform DataScience.com.