Adobe Systems Inc. today announced an agreement to acquire Magento Inc. for $1.68 billion as the venerable software-as-a-service provider seeks to add e-commerce support to its existing cloud marketing services.

Founded in 2008, Magento offers a platform covering digital commerce, order management and business intelligence that it claims enables “both B2B and B2C shopping experiences across the customer journey.” Supporting physical and digital goods, including consumer packaged goods, retail, wholesale, manufacturing and the public sector, the platform is built on open source technology with support from a community of more than 300,000 developers and prebuilt extensions.

Magento, which says it handles $155 billion in gross merchandise volume per year, counts among its customers Canon Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Helly Hansen Holdings AS, Nestle SA, Paul Smith Holdings Ltd., Rosetta Stone Inc. and Warner Music Group.

Following the completion of the deal, expected in the third quarter, Magento will join the Adobe Experience Cloud, the service launched in March 2017 that combines parts of its marketing, analytics and content tools in an effort to broaden its footprint for enterprise marketing personnel.

“Embedding commerce into the Adobe Experience Cloud with Magento enables Adobe to make every moment personal and every experience shoppable,” Brad Rencher, executive vice president of Digital Experience for Adobe, said in a statement. “Adobe is the only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and now commerce — enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey.”

Jason Daigler, research director for digital commerce at Gartner Inc., told SiliconANGLE that “despite partnerships with more than a dozen commerce platforms, Adobe has had a gap in digital commerce for a long time – they couldn’t offer a native commerce platform as part of their suite, so this fills a gap for them.”

Adobe’s main competitors — Salesforce.com Inc., IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. — all have commerce platforms already, he noted –in some cases multiple platforms, such as Salesforce’s from its Demandware and CloudCraze acquisitions. As a result, he said, “I wouldn’t have viewed them as likely acquirers for Magento.”

Coming into the acquisition, Magento was owned by equity firm Permira, which had acquired the company in a leveraged buyout in November 2015 for about $200 million, and Hillhouse Capital, which later invested $250 million into the firm. According to PE Hub, Permira’s return on the sale would have likely been in the vicinity of five times its initial acquisition price.

Peter Sheldon, vice president of strategy at Magento, spoke at the company’s annual conference in April with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, on the company and its strategy in the market:

Photo: robertdouglass/Flickr