Sterling Commerce, a multi-enterprise collaboration company and wholly owned subsidiary of SBC Communications, Inc., purchased Yantra Corp., a provider of distributed order management and supply chain fulfillment solutions, for approximately $170 million in cash. The transaction was completed Jan. 26.

Sterling Commerce expects to retain all Yantra employees and operate the company as a new business division. Yantra's application suite will be incorporated into Sterling Commerce's recently announced Multi-Enterprise Services Architecture. Sterling plans to offer the integrated set of composite applications both as a software solution and hosted service.